Growth opportunities are different from the core
business. They require different skills and metrics and a thorough
understanding of customers’ priorities. Most of all, they require a genuine
commitment — not just fair-weather promises — from the top. These authors have
developed principles that senior managers can apply and institutionalize to
ensure the success of new growth opportunities said an article published by
Ivey business journal.
Most senior managers know intuitively that relying on
the inspired efforts of a few maverick managers to find and nurture new-growth
opportunities is a recipe for stagnation. The odds of success are long, even
for the best ideas, and in most companies the number of talented mavericks can
be counted on one hand. Putting the whole burden of change on their shoulders
will only produce frustration for the mavericks and stagnation for the company.
Success in creating new growth again and again lies in
developing a systematic, organizational capability to identify, shape, and
nurture new-growth initiatives. And the responsibility for doing that lies with
the CEO and the entire senior management team.
Of course, achieving that goal isn’t easy. Most senior
managers who recognize the urgency of new growth get hung up on a series of
thorny issues:
·
Creating
innovative new-growth initiatives without losing discipline and focus on the
core business.
·
Reconciling
the pressure for short-term earnings with multiplying requests for seed funding.
·
Supporting
innovative thinkers and risk takers without signalling neglect of the core
business.
·
Sorting
out the opportunities that could truly move the stock price from those that are
likely to produce only marginal improvements.
·
Finding
the time to guide and coach new-growth teams without neglecting the other
burning issues on the agenda.
·
Managing
these tensions is a long-term discipline rather than a problem to be solved
once and for all. No single set of formulas will fit all companies. However, an
examination of the practices of firms that have successfully fostered
new-growth initiatives suggests that there are six principles that managers can
apply to ensure that these initiatives succeed. Those principles are:
1. Make operational excellence in the core business
your cornerstone.
2. Treat growth as a discipline to be pursued at all
levels throughout the company.
3. Develop many small, maverick ideas, not a few large
ones.
4. Shift resources from product and technology innovation
to customer and business innovation.
5. Organize to suit the needs of the new business as
much as the core business.
6. Use selective acquisitions and alliances to
catalyze growth.
by:
Adrian Slywotzky, Richard Wise
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