If your job is to shepherd, say, Proctor and Gamble forward, then the upside of boldness is radically less than if you're Amazon. And the downside of boldness,

If your job is to shepherd, say, Proctor and Gamble forward, then the upside of boldness is radically less than if you're Amazon. And the downside of boldness, profligate spending, is likely to come out of your margins without ever being made up in the long term. In a relatively mature segment, operational discipline is more important than big ideas and plans. Since the reward system is different, it attracts different people, and a more suitable mentality. This is heavily related to why it's so often that the best people from a growth company leave as the business matures -- the skills that make you great at growing a company will not make you equally successful at managing an existing business, even aside from the fact that growth-company people usually don't like doing the more mundane tasks of a later-stage business.