4 Barriers to Ambitious Growth

For 15 years I’ve been helping business leaders develop and execute ambitious growth strategies. The following piece highlights a few common barriers, which are often blind-spots, that I see holding some companies back from achieving ambitious step-change growth. Have a look - do you recognise any of these traits in your organisation?

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THE “RANDOM ART” MINDSET

When I get a bunch of business leaders in a room to discuss how to consistently deliver ambitious step-change growth - there’s this thing I always do to break the ice. I ask them to put their hands up if they reckon “innovation” is strategically important to their business.

Like an eager bunch of Primary School kids, all of the hands shoot up and we have a conversation about why. The well-trodden platitudes emerge like “adapt or die”, and so-on.

This is a set-up, however, because (spoiler alert!) the next thing I do is ask them to keep their hands up if they have a “way” of doing that “thing” whose strategic importance they just passionately argued for. Inevitably the vast majority of hands go down.

It never ceases to amaze me how paradoxical this is. I can think of no other business activity where the stated importance by the most senior people is so high, and yet the actual priority given to it in terms of resourcing or any form of permanent, reliable repeatable process is so low – in many cases non-existent.

Businesses all have systems and processes for HR, finance and so-on, but innovation? Leaders often believe that success in this area is more of a random art-form that is to magically come about whenever we get a spare minute or two (and we never do).

If it is as important as people say then it deserves to be properly resourced and taken seriously as a tangible business process to ensure any chance of reliable success.

THE DILLUSION THAT CUSTOMERS CAN CONSUME 3X AS MUCH

Now, you might be thinking “I clicked on an article about the challenges of delivering ambitious step-change business growth, why is it talking about innovation?”

That mindset is the next barrier I wish to highlight.

The notion of step-change growth and innovation are not mutually exclusive - they go hand-in-hand.

If the phrase “step-change ambitious growth” conjures up a similar scale of growth to you as it does to me then you’ll see that, no-matter how much harder you sell or put effort into improving your offering – your existing market is unlikely to start consuming 2/3/4x as much of what they buy from you currently unless you really have barely scratched the surface of your existing market opportunity.

The answer to serious growth of that nature, therefore, most likely lies in “stuff” (products/services/customers/markets etc) you literally don’t have as you sit here today.

Innovation is any initiative which has the potential to deliver a step-change in the relative success of your enterprise, but carries with it a significant downside risk because of the present unknowns. New products and services being the most obvious examples, but also new markets, business models or major internal system/process changes can also share this definition.

So, you can see why it’s considered to be strategically important to leaders with seriously ambitious growth aspirations. The chances of them delivering step-changes in growth by getting their existing market to buy multiples more of what they currently sell is virtually nil.

And yet…..there’s a reason I didn’t use the word “innovation” in the LinkedIn post you clicked (or the title of this article!). Because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that that if I had, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now!

“Read about delivering serious business growth??? Hell yeah!”

“Read about Innovation? Nah – I’ll get around to that whenever I get a minute after delivering this ambitious growth.”

THE "PERFECT BLUEPRINT" MINDSET

The next mindset barrier that I often see lies with those already convinced of this notion about the necessity to innovate, but are paralysed by inertia. Often, they have a pet project that, when you ask around the company, people will tell you “Has been getting talked about for years”.

This inertia is caused by a very attractive upside “if this works out” (so the project stays perpetually on-the-table) but a paralysing fear of the perceived downside risk coming to pass, creating an absolute barrier to advance the project towards commercialisation. The result is that it just hangs around getting talked about in circular conversations forever.

When you dig deeper, I often find that the fear component has roots in the memory of a very costly failure in the past that we “learned our lesson from” by writing big cheques too early without enough information.

So, what was that lesson they learned? They learned that now we must ensure we know almost everything before doing anything at all….. and while we pursue the perfect blueprint, the opportunity flies past the window.

LINEAR APPROACHES UNVEILING BIASES IN COMPANY CULTURE

Getting a commercial venture to “work” is an extremely complex undertaking. The final jigsaw puzzle has many interconnected pieces which must “sing” together in order for success in any market to prevail.

You can tell a lot about the culture of a company by which of these elements they prioritise. For example, companies with a high proportion of science/technology people are often very focussed on the technical solution at the behest of other areas which can be equally (and sometimes more) connected to commercial success. “Over-engineering” and a “build-it-they-will-come” approach would be common in those environments.

However, the creation of a technical solution to any problem is an academic pursuit. A commercially successful product requires business model development, pricing, effective marketing communications, development of relationships with channel partners, financing….the list goes on-and-on. What’s more – these elements are connected. Change one aspect of any one of them and many other things must be revisited along with it. The permutations are vast.

So why, then, do we often develop these elements one-at-a-time. Attempting to “solve” one area of the idea before progressing to the next? Whether we realise it or not, when we do this we are exhibiting our unconscious bias towards the “importance” of some aspects of the commercial project over the others. The truth is that they all have to work to achieve commercial success.

Put differently, imagine if a hypothetical stage 10 of your commercialisation process can still kill the project - ?then this approach means you are at serious risk of having wasted all of your time, money and effort on stages 1-9.

The most common manifestation of this that I witness is when companies call-in the sales/marketing depts to begin to think about selling their new product after it is fully developed. In reality, they should have been writing customer marketing concepts before they screwed a nut or bolt on anything or wrote a single line of code.

-Jamie

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