If you want to slow growth, hire a bean counter. Or if you have...

If you want to slow growth, hire a bean counter. Or if you have incompetent management. A good bean counter will stabilize a business but won’t really tolerate much creativity or flamboyance. A good example is when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in the 1990s. He was known for high-quality, daring but expensive and risky projects. Many failed. The bean counters came in and 1990s Macs were rather straightforward and plain. The business stopped growing but also cut spending. A plateau in growth signaled to consumers that perhaps Apple was dead. So they stopped caring. The business was near death when Jobs came back with his wild ideas.In media, you see it with newspapers and radio. Small media outlets were bought up by corporations and then bean counters zapped all the personality from these outlets to the point where once flavorful publications and radio stations with wonderful writers and provocative DJs now are quite generic. The audiences don’t leave immediately. They leave in dribs and drabs because the bean cutters don’t cut everything right away. It might be 20 years of gradual reductions before an audience member gives up on a product, not really remembering why they’d liked that newspaper or radio station so much in the first place. The bean counters will long be retired by then, or they’ll simply blame the downfall on the Internet. Never their fault.