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 […]
I work with a number of firms that most would call large companies, yet if you spent time with them, you’d find they are at a stage where they feel quite pressed. It’s a paradox that puts multi $100 million firms in a quandary around growth and innovation. Internally constrained teams leave a lot of […]
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 […]
Brace yourself for it: the click bait posts will be coming to your inbox soon, with titles like, “The Top Ten Trends to Watch in 2017”, or “Don’t Miss These Three for 2023.” Why do marketing and consulting firms amplify these and deluge us with them like clockwork every year? Peter Drucker gives us a […]
Everything looked good: the team was solid, the patents were sound, the pipeline of customers robust and the financials were reviewed and approved. The CTO & COO had overwhelmingly given their approval and the transaction was completed. You know how the next step in this real-life example plays out. The go-to market, operations, human resources […]
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 […]
