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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
This summer has provided me with the unique opportunity to literally pick up and move our household to a wonderful new location that will better serve my growing business and family. Being a strategist, I routinely help teams find new paths and take change journeys. Yet when we are the ones impacted by the event, […]
I have been having some great conversations with senior growth leaders following my Three Essential Ingredients for a Successful Growth Program webinar. What continues to excite and surprise me, is that by making the task of growth project creation simpler and more specific, it is releasing energy and starting conversations. (If you haven’t had time […]
