The 5 Davidic Growth Principles

There are five principles of Davidic Growth. They are finding your purpose, knowing yourself, being authentic, being humble, and being curious. These are the things that guide the fourteen-week engagement that I do with companies. And I start with telling them "You need to start with being clear about your purpose."

1. Find your purpose

If possible, the purpose of a company should be something that is audaciously big and aspirational. In the book Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, he calls this the massive transformative purpose or MTP. In this book, the author studied companies that grew 10x faster than their competitors and in a short period of time. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Spotify, and Airbnb. He asked the basic question, "How were these companies able to do it?" And one of the things he found out common among these companies is that they all had a Massive Transformative Purpose. Think Big, that is what this is telling us.

As an example, let us look at Google. Google started in 1998, grew to 4B users, and by the start of 2022 was valued at $420B. But right from the start, their massive transformative purpose was "Organize the world's information". An audaciously big, aspirational purpose. But something that transformed our planet, our habits and the way we work. Nowadays when you want to search for an information we typically say "You Google it." This MTP has given Google it's clear "Why?" behind what they're doing and it has united them and moved them to action all these years.

2. Know yourself

The next principle is "know yourself". In the Davidic Growth framework, we do it by conducting a digital maturity assessment of the company. The purpose is to provide us with a baseline on what stage the company is in their digital transformation journey. The other important value of the digital maturity assessment is that we are able to see what the company's current digital capabilities are so that we can properly pace the introduction of new technologies in a way that will not overwhelm them or choke them. More often than not, the reason why companies fail in their digital transformation is that they introduce technology too much too soon.

3. Be authentic

The third principle is "be authentic". This is in line with the Davidic Growth paradigm of creating a "mindset of preempting advantages from becoming liabilities and reframing disadvantages to become opportunities." We do this through a workshop where the company lists down all that they can think of as its advantages or strengths, and all its disadvantages or weaknesses. The exercise is meant to give the company a chance to look at itself introspectively and truly be authentic about what they find in the process.

4. Be humble

The fourth principle is "be humble". In the second workshop that we conduct for the Davidic Growth Paradigm, we go through the list of advantages that were written in the first workshop and humbly examine ourselves how these advantages can become liabilities if we are not careful. Just like in the story of Blockbuster and Netflix that I recounted in my article "The Davidic Growth Mindset" , if we become too complacent about our advantage or if we become arrogant about our strength, they may backfire on us and our strength dissipates into a weakness.

5. Be curious

The fifth principle is "be curious". In my article on "Curiosity is the Father of Invention" , I mentioned that curiosity is the sibling of creativity and innovation. The next exercise in the framework is to look at the disadvantages or weaknesses that were written in the first workshop and focus our inquisitive minds into looking at them from a different angle. By being curious enough, we may be able to extract opportunities from our disadvantages and lead us to innovate or even come up with new insights that will turn our weaknesses to our advantage.

By going through these five steps, a business is able to walk itself through a journey of discovery. The Davidic Growth Paradigm is a framework that harnesses the potentials of digital transformation to create exponential growth by helping a business entity have a deep and meaningful understanding of where it is currently at, identifying where it wants to bring itself to, and creating a transformative roadmap to make it happen.

Find out more about the paradigm at https://www.davidicgrowth.com.

*Cover image based on image by Erich Wirz from Pixabay .

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