I had a version of this call three times in the last six months: “Where did I go wrong? We planned thoroughly, tested and refined our concepts and built an All Star team. Things went smoothly for about eight weeks…and then all hades broke loose. There were things we just didn’t anticipate. Now we have […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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’ve worked as a practitioner, and currently as an advisor, in a very specific niche where I guide those leaders who are accountable for driving the growth of their firms. This might be the CEO of a smaller firm, or perhaps a member of the executive staff or a team for a large firm charged […]
I’ve had the honor of mentoring many organizational leaders over my career, and one of the most rewarding categories I’ve found is the Growth Leader. By Growth Leaders, I mean the individuals who recognize opportunity, develop an investable plan and rally a team of people to capitalize on it. In mentoring these leaders, I have […]
I was having coffee with senior co-leads of a large growth effort, and the question they had for me was, “how do we know if we’ve assembled the right team?” When you get a question like that, you know the answer is yes, they have a problem. I asked them some questions, and it led […]
