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From investors to individuals, we have come to expect the increasing returns and improved lifestyles made possible by continual short-term corporate growth. But this endless pursuit of growth, with its handful of winners but many more losers, is folly and unsustainable. In the face of environmental degradation, growing complexity, and increasing volatility (from pandemics to mass migration and terrorism to political populism), we need to find a new model of corporate long-term sustainability that benefits all stakeholders.

We believe this requires a rethink about the limits to growth and how publicly listed companies are run as a consequence. It requires a change in mindset. It calls for the governance of companies to become more strategic so that boards have a genuine responsibility for a firm's future and prosperity.

And this means the strategy process has to be more collaborative—emerging from the interaction between boards and the CEO.

We came to this subject not as governance experts but from decades of studying and writing about various aspects of strategy and the strategy process. One of the constant themes in our field is to understand why companies fail—with plenty of helpful theories and frameworks having emerged and been implemented over the years to strengthen companies against such failure. But in our own work, we began to recognize that large, listed companies in particular were facing a more systemic challenge that put their long-term survival in peril—in short, the pressure from investors to deliver continual quarterly growth was having a devastating toxic side effect on the strategy process, on investment and resource allocation decisions, and on the culture in many firms.

We saw it firsthand in our research and analysis of the spectacular rise and fall of Nokia in mobile phones. Nokia had been at the forefront of the transformation of the mobile telecommunications industry, which it came to dominate with a global market share of over 40 percent and one of the world's most valuable brands. Yet, within three years, the business dramatically failed, and there was no easy answer as to why. Yes, a succession of poor strategic decisions had been made against a backdrop of stalling underlying growth and investor expectations. And yes, the spirit of collaboration and innovation that had contributed greatly to Nokia's early success had been replaced by infighting, internal competition, and incrementalism as the dominant core business sucked the air from any other initiatives. But there was something missing from this picture.

It may have happened over a shorter time frame, but Nokia's story is not unique. And so we began to ask ourselves, given the tensions between the limited growth in mature businesses and stock market expectations, how can companies escape the growth curse (even though back then we hadn't yet coined that term)? And how can maturity be managed without destroying value and the long-term viability of the firm? We felt these were critical questions because large companies play an important role in wealth creation, knowledge creation, and bringing innovations to market in ways that small companies rarely have the scale or expertise to do (recall the rapid development and rollout of vaccines during the COVID pandemic and the critical role that large pharmaceutical companies played).

Our embryonic thoughts were brought more sharply into focus in 2016, when Andrea Cuomo, a senior executive at STMicroelectronics and long-time collaborator and supporter of our research in the fields of both innovation and alliances, began talking to us about his own observations of companies transitioning from growth to maturity and the crisis this often led to, particularly in fast-moving environments and when the company had the "wrong" shareholders. Over the next few years, we met with Andrea numerous times to discuss this subject, flesh out ideas, and begin to think about high-level "ideal world" solutions to put a stop to the pattern of growth, maturity, and then crisis.

Our work gathered momentum, and the more people we interviewed and the more we read, we realized that at the heart of the problem was a concept of governance, which too often resulted in little more than arm's-length oversight and approval. Boards are, in theory at least, responsible for safeguarding the future of the firm, but it was difficult to see how they could realistically do this without being more engaged in the strategy process. And so, pulling together various threads, we began bridging the hitherto separate worlds of strategy and governance in a bid to propose an alternative to the growth curse.