Reliable Promises Create Mediocrity
“They’ve been sandbagging me,” the president of a multi-billion-dollar company exclaimed when I showed her a summary?of the upsides in the growth portfolio.?
After years of declining growth and spending more and more “fighting the fade” of revenue in the core business, she had decided she needed to revitalize innovation. As part of that effort, they were deploying a Strategic Portfolio Management process in the organization. The objective was to find opportunities with more meaningful impact and to improve the business processes so that they could deliver such opportunities less haphazardly. This meeting was my opportunity to share the results on the first complete view of the portfolio.?
The chart that had caught her attention showed the upside and downside uncertainty in the business cases for about a hundred innovation projects that the company was pursuing?[Figure 1]. For most of the projects, the range of uncertainty was relatively narrow. But for about one in five of the projects, the upsides were massive—if pursued correctly and with a little luck, some of them could produce 10x the returns in the base business case. We had found hidden growth opportunities nascent in the current set of projects!?
Read more about this client's experience in finding the real obstacle to the big dream. >> https://bit.ly/3ogoczA
Post Production Manager and Head of Sound at UCLA Film Department
2 年I just had this conversation with my Dad las week. He pointed to a company that said their only metric of success was 100% customer satisfaction. He then quickly pointed out how that yielded a situation in which the employees concomitantly picked and chose the customer orders that they knew would be happy without tackling anything difficult. By widening the scope of success to multiple data points, that revealed the path forward.