If there's one thing the small-business owner/manager doesn't need, it's more advice. Counsel on how to run a small business sprouts like dandelions in the spring. From the shelves of Toronto's Books for Business comes a list of advisory manuals that are nothing if not imaginative, including Jesus CEO (Little Brown, $23.95), What Would Machiavelli Do? (HarperCollins, $22.95) and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun (Warner Business Books, $17.95). Lucid or obscure, this torrent of prose is directed at small-business owners. Those who run the big companies talk to their $300 consultants who write some of this stuff. Amid all the advice to pray for success, coerce it from enemies or just beat them into submission, there are some theories not based on fiction. "The reality of management is that how you manage has to change as your business changes over time," says Dave Cook, a partner in KPMG's enterprise practice in Toronto.

"Management and leadership techniques have to evolve as business grows and matures," he explains. "Business development is like a parabola, with sales on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. You start out with sales growing, then flattening out and finally, if the company has not found something else to do, beginning to fall."

At each stage from birth to growth to maturity and decline, there is a need for a different business-management strategy, he says.

"When you start out, sales grow slowly and, in that stage, the entrepreneur is involved in the business. The small company can do things for less than large organizations can. There will be focus on research and development. When the company gets to be larger and is in a growth phase, the need is no longer to be accepted in the marketplace, but to have systems that can deliver quality," he says.

As the business grows further, the need for micromanagement by the founder decreases, Cook insists. If the owner can't move to delegating authority and hiring good people for the job, the firm can fail, he adds.

As the company continues to grow, the need for good governance increases. Finally, when a company has achieved its maturity and its products begin to be less appealing to the market, there is a need to get expenses down, he adds.

The problem, of course, is that products reach maturity and then tend to disappear. A review of the companies in the Dow Jones industrial average index in 1896, 1916 and 1928 shows how fleeting success can be. The 1896 list was a group of smokestack companies that included American Cotton Oil and Distilling and Cattle Feeding.

Companies in the 1916 list also fared badly. Studebaker married Packard Motors, then failed. Western Union, a communications company, survived as a telex operator until the 1970s, then morphed into a financial-services company with its name, though not its business, intact. The 1928 Dow list included Nash Motors, which made the fondly remembered coffin on wheels, the Nash Metropolitan, and then went through several mergers before disappearing after a successor company built a vehicle that resembled nothing so much as a blood blister. Of the current Dow industrials, only General Electric was on the 1928, 1916 and 1896 lists. It moved with the times from making light bulbs to making toasters, jet engines and running a huge international quasi-bank, GE Capital.

Technological change is the hope of new companies and the death of old ones that do not adapt. In the transition phases, as companies are growing or contracting, management skills have to change, Cook says.

"What made a firm successful in a prior phase is not what is needed in the next phase," he says. "Linear thinking leads to failure. And survival requires that a firm shape its destiny to the future. A window venetian blind maker that sees itself as just that will never be more. A venetian blind maker that sees itself as being in the environmental management business or the security industry has much more to look forward to. That is the vision the management has to shape as business grows."