I was on the phone with an executive from a mid-sized firm last month, and she was sharing that their growth agenda for the upcoming year was biased toward low risk, “because they lacked the critical mass” to take on a potentially more rewarding project. I share this not because it’s not a good reason […]
We are living in the era of unlocking hidden potential. Uber set up a marketplace and now unlocks value in both unused vehicle seats and good drivers with time on their hands. Big data projects go to work mining out value by looking into massive (& valuable) troves of unstructured information behind the firewalls of […]
True Story: As a mid-senior strategist, I was invited to a series of meetings to define the “next billion dollar business” which was being led by an internal group charged with helping a C-level leader “leave a legacy.” The timeframe was extremely short, and the results were a mix of older zombie programs that were […]
One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned about getting new to-market growth projects done over my 30+ year career, is one that started out sounding good but ended up being dead wrong. When I was a young P&L manager tasked with leading new-to-market product and service teams, I was pulled aside by a sage […]
So, you’ve just completed planning for the next 3-5 years and feel really good about your baked in growth. You are launching products, have some good organic growth for services already in the market and are investing in some game-changing R&D. Each of these areas has been well vetted and you’re confident that you can […]
The question hangs like a fog over every firm I have the opportunity to work with. Simply stated, how do we get a hard driving and skeptical leadership team to be willing to adopt this promising, yet nascent, new project? Inevitably, once they have an established business and more than one hundred employees, the organization […]
One of the most-asked questions I get when working with a team on strategy is, “What’s next?” “What kind of cutting edge products and services can I expect to see soon?” A great place to look is at the intersection of investment and entrepreneurship. To gain the most up-to-date insights, I regularly attend showcase sessions […]
You and your team have worked hard for weeks to tee up a proposal for something very new, and you know it’s solid. Customer interest has been validated, you have identified a path to the market, and you have worked through how you might get a production team in place. Yet, somehow when the senior […]
I had dinner with a colleague recently who is heading up a new growth vector for his firm. The topic turned to one of those you don’t read about often: what happens if it goes sideways? I reminded him that everyone who has led one of these efforts experiences three phases of a journey. First […]
This week a colleague phoned, and after a moment of reconnection, shared a traumatic moment on an internal growth project. Long story short, there was a direct public challenge to their growth leadership in carrying out a key task. When I listened carefully to what the challenge was and its context, I recognized it to […]
