Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Five Steps to Long-Term Growth – Huh?

Even though I was browsing the HBR Bogs, I was still a little surprised to see a post titled Five Steps to Long Term Growth because, to be honest, thanks to Wall Street, I didn’t think anyone knew what Long-Term Growth meant anymore. And I’m being serious here. The focus on quarterly earnings calls has gotten so intense that it’s almost obscene — the nosedive a stock takes in the market after a bad earnings call is typically so severe that one would think the world is going to end.

Not only did this intense focus on short-term profit cause the end of the famed research labs in the 1990s (like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Texas Instruments — and yes, I know that Bell, PARC, and TI still exist, but what we have today is not what we had then), two major market busts in the naughts (as everyone tried to IPO at unsustainable valuations), and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs (because people cost money and it’s more profitable to operate at skeleton crew levels and make everyone, in fear for their jobs, work unpaid overtime than actually be responsible and use the obscene amounts of profit the corporation is making to actually hire the headcount the organization should have), but it pretty much spelled the end of any thought to growth plans beyond the next year in the corporate boardroom – at least as far as I can see.

Of course, it is this lack of focus on the long term that captures everything that is wrong with the marketplace today. Once long term growth and sustainability take centre stage, short term profit becomes unimportant, Wall Street is told to go <expletive> themselves, people become as important as product, and the market changes — for the better. If you would like the market to change for the better, and become successful beyond your wildest dreams when it does, you can start by taking Vijay Govindarajan’s advice and take the following Five Steps to Long Term Growth.

1. Decide What You Are Playing For

Are you playing for the fat <expletive>s on Wall Street? Or are you playing for yourself and your stakeholders. If the latter, then you have to take a stand and do something about it. No one is going to do it for you.

2. Get Everyone Speaking the Same Language

Once you decide you’re playing for the long term, the next thing you have to do is something different. Growth means fostering transformational or breakthrough innovation. This will require identifying value propositions that will expand your business into new markets with new advantages.

3. Imagine Your Future

If you want sustainable growth, you must have a sense of what the future will be, what it will require, and how you will win. Then you apply your breakthrough or transformational innovation to achieving that vision.

4. Align Your Actions With Your Intentions

As Def Leppard said in a fit of Pyromania, it’s Action, Not Words. You have to remember that your people are used to hearing a lot of big talk about great new initiatives that never come to pass and without some action behind them, they will assume that your words are just another corporate fad that will be forgotten as time passes. If you say you are going to eliminate all traces of phosphate from your products, assemble teams to do it. If you say you are going to create 50 jobs with a new initiative, start hiring!

5. Do It!

Growth is hard work requiring strategy, judgment, and leadership. It involves risk. It involves you. You will have to keep doing it. Day in. Day out. Day over. Day under. Day torn asunder. And back to day in.

New Year, New Genome?

A new year is upon us. A new year that will not only be fraught with Risk, as per our recent series on Risk 2011 / Risk 2012, but a new year that will be brimming with opportunity, for those with the insight to identify it and the innovation to capture it.

And when SI says innovation, it means innovation, not renovation. Sergio Zyman may have preached renovation before innovation, but it’s not enough anymore. Any company that has survived the recent downturn relatively intact has more than likely already renovated its brands, products, and core competencies to the max and needs something to get it to the next level. And, more than likely, that something has to go beyond a traditional Blue Ocean innovation strategy (as one never knows if that’s a sea anyone wants to sail) to a Golden Apple strategy that will enable the company to deliver products and services that the majority of customers in its target market segments want (and that will sell out months in advance in pre-orders).

This will require a shift from Best Practices to Next Practices as the organization redefines how it does business. One way an organization can achieve this is to employ the Business Genome approach described by Andrea Kates in Find Your Next.

The Business Genome approach is based on a genome mindset [that] sparks new insights for translating the DNA of one business to the growth challenges of another as this allows strategists to see through a new lens — an absolute necessity if an organization is going to identify the Next Practices required to take it to the Next Level required to develop, and deliver, a Golden Apple strategy. [In olden times, everyone wanted the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs. Today, everyone wants an i-Device — an iPod, an iPhone, and an iPad — these are the golden eggs of modern consumerism and the Apple strategic mindset that created it transformed Apple from has-been to global leader.]

Our next post will discuss the Business Genome approach, described as the Key to Next, and review Andrea Kates’ Find Your Next. Stay tuned!

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time has passed
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time ago
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
We have missed them every one
When will they return?
When will they return?

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time has passed
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time ago
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
On a voyage every one
When will they return?
When will they return?

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time has passed
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time ago
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Gone overseas every one
When will they return?
When will they return?

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time passing
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time ago
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Gone with the wind every one
When will they return?
When will they return?

Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time passing
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Long time ago
Where Have The Maniacs Gone?
Yes we will miss them every one
And will they return?
And will they return?

Dedicated to Wacko, Yacko, & Dot who have not been heard from since they set sail for Europe last January (shortly after wishing us a Happy New Year and promising to return to these venerated pages). Let’s hope they made it safely!