Conversation with passionate founder: “I’ve built a device that is an amazing addition to the business traveler with features of x,x and x. Can you help me get a conversation with the big 3 cell phone firms?” As part of my work, I get a chance to work with early stage firms and their passionate […]
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 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 […]
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-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 […]
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 […]
One of the privileges of working with dozens of enterprises on their business growth around the world is seeing the intrinsic skills of what I have come to call their key “Growth Leaders.” By Growth Leader, I mean someone who regardless of the external factors of the business, is fantastic at finding the underlying emergent […]
I was leading a Senior Leadership Team workshop for a publicly-traded firm recently when one of the participants became prematurely attached to a (very) specific project. I have seen this happen over and over in my work, and left unchallenged, it always leads to lost time, money and talent. There are two categories of leadership […]
