Growing Pains, 5th Edition

Preface

Growing Pains deals with the problems of building sustainably successful organizations^® over the long term. The first edition of this book—published in 1986 and titled, How to Make the Transition from Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm—was written after Eric Flamholtz became aware of the paucity of theory, research, and tools for the management of entrepreneurial organizations.

Prior to the first edition of this book, most if not virtually all of business education ignored entrepreneurship and focused instead on “business administration.” This meant focusing on large established companies such as Bank of America, Boeing, Exxon, IBM, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, and similar institutional “blue chip” companies that had ...