Like the creatures grazing the open grasslands of Africa, firms known as ‘gazelles’ are not just fast (in this case, fast growing), but hard to hunt down. That’s partly because they are rare. Relatively early estimates suggested they make up just 4 per cent of firms (Birch, 1979), and if anything, these estimates seem to have overshot the mark. Birch’s work brought this small cluster of fast-growing firms into prominence, because he claimed that these relatively small and young firms captured the lion’s share of net jobs growth in the economy.
Generally, gazelles are defined by their percentage of sustained growth, either in turnover or employment, but some definitions guarantee the gazelle minority status, defining the breed as the crème-de-la-crème, gazelles simply being the fastest-growing firms in a population (Henrekson and Johansson, 2009), and while their role as jobs generators has been heavily questioned (Davis et al., 1996), gazelles are undoubtedly a fascinating laboratory in which to study HRM.
These high-growth firms can create severe pressure on the management of people. They tend to be innovative in the way they handle people, and they are certainly innovative in products and service as they seek to rapidly carve out a niche in the economy, but such innovations come at a cost for staff and management (Janssen et al., 2004). As the organization – or subunit – grows beyond a certain size, inconsistencies in treatment, exacerbated by the creation of a management chain, and an increasingly depersonalized management, gives rise to incentives for more systematic HR policies and procedures to prevent mistakes. In cases where sub-units attempt to replicate parent company policy, there may be strains between generic parent expectations and specific local conditions. Nevertheless, formalizing HR structures can also help to retain expertise and ensure that foundation levels of commitment are maintained. For example, in order to recruit staff, rather than relying on word-of-mouth and existing contacts, greater use is made of sophisticated methods for recruitment and selection, training, performance review and pay and reward. As the need for specialist expertise becomes more apparent across the whole organization, so too does the pressure to employ professional HR services internal to the organization. If HRM is still informal and ad hoc, an increasing number of problems are bound to emerge because HR policies – such as grievance and discipline procedures or pay systems –
are applied inconsistently. The result is policy made on the run by the managers by whom everything has to be funneled through them, enmeshing them with all HR issues.

Becoming a gazelle in the midst of the global financial crisis (GFC) is no mean feat, but the route to success for the two companies we will examine, New Leaf Supermarkets and Freshcoat, with a growth from zero to around 100 staff in four years at the height of the GFC came by very different means. Australia, where both companies were situated, was a unique case in terms of GFC response, in that the federal government had a substantial war chest with which to stimulate declining economic growth. Nevertheless, Dun and Bradstreet numbers showed a 48 per cent increase in small business failures in 2010–11 and an extraordinary 95 per cent fall in the number of start-ups (Dun and Bradstreet, 2012). However, neither New Leaf nor Freshcoat took advantage of federal munificence, and instead trod much more conventional paths to success. But that is where the similarity ends.
New Leaf began as a university project for its founding CEO, who was asked by some friends, who were supermarket managers, for assistance in responding to an impending takeover of the company that employed them, a takeover that threatened their job security. The accidental nature of the company’s birth contrasted with the very deliberate manner in which the principals executed their plan to enter the supermarket industry, gradually buying up cheap or under-valued assets, some in remote rural locations, and adding value to their new outlets with low-cost makeovers and a new service orientation. ‘We were, I suppose, hungry to acquire more stores, and put some volume into the business and establish a support office, and get all the resources that we needed,’ recalled the CEO. Ultimately, this hunger proved costly.
At first, the tactic of developing some skills, such as human resource management – using intensive training for a former grassroots supermarket supervisor who became HRM manager – and importing others, such as the former finance manager of a significant airport retailing chain, seemed to work. The company and the brand gained peer respect. While the company, like the CEO leading it, was remarkably young, it demonstrated all the attributes of a mature firm. It had a solid hard-working head office, relatively sober attitudes to cost, and hid its cost-cutting measures (such as its paint-brush and broom-stick approach to refurbishing stores) well enough to disguise the cash-flow difficulties associated with rapid growth in a competitive industry.
The Australian supermarket industry is almost internationally unique in that a colossal 80 per cent of the Australian retail groceries market is dominated by just two players, Woolworths and Coles, companies so large (despite the relatively small Australian market)
that they are both within the top 25 retailers in the world. Against a background of two Goliaths, New Leaf was very much a David. When New Leaf made a play for a high-profile (but failing) fruit and vegetable retailer, it was a signal of intent. Due diligence dragged on, and in what may well have been a case of the power of sunk costs detailed in Teger and Cary’s Too Much Invested to Quit (1980), despite niggling concerns, New Leaf sealed the deal. ‘Every day literally a skeleton jumps out of the closet,’ the CEO admitted, months later. Later the same year, the company had fallen into administration. The outlets associated with the fruit and vegetable retailer all closed, with staff laid off. Some of the original New Leaf sites remained open, under new management. The dream was over less than four years after it began........

Questions
1 I n what way do these cases illustrate the role of organizational slack in mediating approaches to HRM problems?
2 What special challenges and opportunities does the growth experienced by a gazelle firm imply for the HRM manager?
3 What advantages and disadvantages would Fresh coat have experienced, if it had introduced formal HRM policies earlier in its lifecycle?