Imagine this: you’ve just left your boss’ office and you were given the ball on a major, new, cross-functional project. You are buzzing with ideas about who you need, what you need, and the time and effort it’s going to take. The question running through your mind in those moments is what should I do [...]
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Three Ways to Engage Your Growth Leaders
Now that you know the value of growth leaders and how to spot the good ones, what do you do to keep them engaged? Entire books have been written on this topic, but let me touch on three key areas from my experience. 1) Ask them to go into new places and learn new things If a request [...]
3 Reasons You Need a Growth Leader
The global financial crisis of 2008 shifted the business world in a fundamental way. No longer is it sufficient to have a stream of products or a portfolio of solutions. To be effective and vibrant in this new world you need a portfolio of business models. Business model engineering is done by a new breed [...]
3 Stages of Rockstar Growth Leaders & How to Spot Them
Finding someone with just the right combination of qualities to lead a growth project for your organization can be tough. To make matters worse, they can be hiding right under your nose in the most unlikely places. The search for under-the-radar growth leaders is not unlike the story of the Detroit-based musician Rodriguez — while [...]
How to Blow Your Next Meeting Out of the Water
I was meeting with a colleague this week and we were commenting about the relative rarity of meeting with people who have truly done their homework prior to holding a discussion. How many times have you met with someone who is clearly “winging it,” and starting with the sketchiest of intentions? We used to call [...]
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Preparing for the Ascent: A Growth Leaders’ Action Plan
This is the sixth and final post in my summer series is intended to help you map your external and internal environments and let you hit the ground running after summer vacation. If you have missed any of them, you can find them here – and don’t forget to enter your name and email at [...]
5 Keys to the Success of a Breakaway Team
This is the fourth post in a series to amp up your ability to see and exploit massive external change waves. Up through this point in the series, we’ve looked at how to map and forecast change cycles that are happening in the world around us. Going forward, we’re going to look at what an [...]
How to turn Conflict into a Breakthrough
Everyone wants to transform, but nobody wants to change. — Frederica Mathewes-Green Right now, there is a dynamic at work in your organization preventing innovation — ideas are getting lost in translation. In technology-driven businesses, there are two functionally and physically separate teams: the one that does the R&D, and the operations team that turns technology [...]
What Marvel’s Avengers Teach us About Leading Great Teams
The much-awaited Avengers movie is due out this summer, based on the 1963 Marvel Comics series about a group of superheroes teaming up to defeat evil — Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and Captain America among them. I have fond memories of going to the drugstore to buy some of those issues. I was especially [...]
The Secret to Increasing Growth without Increasing R&D Spending
One of the great things about the technology business is that you invent your company’s assets by harnessing the global brain power of your enterprise. At the end of 2011, Strategy+Business published their annual survey of the 1000 companies in the world that spent the most on R&D. What they found has important implications for [...]