The 2 Types Of Growth - Horizontal Vs Vertical

Both types of growth can be perceived and applied to personal and business growth. Growth happens gradually over a period of time with focus and efforts to outgrow who as a person or business you are in the present.

Personal growth

Horizontal growth:

When you are aspiring to become an engineer, doctor or a scientist, you are looking at horizontal growth at the beginning. The risk involved is less because you work through what is known to be working for everyone else. But when you decide that you would like to innovate and improve things beyond what is already there, you think of vertical growth.

You learn things out of need and skillsets that are deemed to be important. You are not yet driven, but you still want to learn it in the process of becoming someone you want to be. You just stick to working through what has always been the regular way of working. The thought process is more towards finding the way to get he job done improvisation may be or may not be there.

There are less breakthroughs and more of repetitions happening over a period of time. It's not boring, yet it's not growing is the feel that you might feel for yourself. There is a danger of being stagnant and losing your individuality while getting comfortable with what is easy and comfortable. It is for the same reason you keep hearing that you shouldn't become comfortable in life.

Vertical growth:

This is where a lot of action happens along with a lot of uncertainty in life. You just keep working with passion as a fuel and you have a larger goal, which is the driving force. In vertical growth, you should be empowered to take bold decisions and need a lot more understanding about the world and it makes you relentless. Mediocrity is something you don't practice and you look forward to continuing building on what you are working on regardless of major breakthroughs at the initial stage.

You don't stop regardless of the results. You take risks and anticipate results from the efforts because you know your capabilities and trust them. Vertical growth will instill and inspire you to go chasing your goals with knowing a calm confidence.

Business growth:

Horizontal growth is less innovative, repeatable, less risky and predictable to a certain extent. The progress of innovation and breakthroughs if of less importance than figuring out the ways to increase company revenue.

When a new business is started it just adds another flavor or color to the existing known product. For horizontal growth, you don't need a lot of creativity and skillset. Rather, logical thinking and required skillset with a fixated efficient process. A business needs to know "how it is done" and identify "how it can be improvized for efficiency". There is still a lot of hard work and talent, but you know what you are doing very well from the beginning. This growth is more predictive and limited if there is no strong vision laid out by the leaders.

Vertical growth:

Vertical growth is where there is a lot of uncertainty, risk and exponential growth lies. In the beginning you just work on your idea and you think you have something that can generate value, and you have done your due diligence. You need a level of talent and experience to be able to achieve vertical growth. A strong vision and foundation is to be laid out first to achieve this kind of growth.

A strong skillset and expertise is mandatory and great strategies and planning with critical thinking is involved in the process. Vertical growth takes time and patience and the pace of growth decreases with increase in the size of the organization as everything starts getting more fixated and bounded to a set of processes.