Building the Organization to Grow

There was a story in September 2015 from WIRED.com about Reid Hoffman’s insight into Silicon Valley success: for Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a partner with VC firm Greylock Partners, success comes from rapidly building the organization, not merely from a great product. As WIRED paraphrased, it’s not about the startup, but the scale-up.

Great insight. Isn’t SV-like the kind of success you want to have? So what do you do about it?

This is the first in a series of posts to enable organizations to build out their business for sustained, rapid growth.

Growing a very successful company means putting into place the integrated framework to have the entire organization perform at the highest level. While there is nothing prescriptive, there are fundamental components from a research-validated model that every high-performing organization must have:

• a core context to define the foundation of what the organization is about and which serves to align everyone’s efforts
• a strategy to fulfill its mission and achieve its goals
• a tangible commitment to innovation as the only sustainable competitive advantage
• close engagement with customers to anticipate and meet their needs and wants
• an environment of perpetual learning
• a work system that leverages the full talents of the workforce
• investing in and developing the people who create the value for customers
• a constant focus on generating results as the only way to achieve sustainability and realize the intended objectives

Organizations that have embraced this framework have demonstrated dramatically superior performance to their competition along financial and non-financial dimensions, including returns that have outpaced the S&P 500 by over 5-to-1.

We’ll take you step-by-step through a process that will enable you to take your organization on a sustained path of exponential growth. And when you’ve taken that path, you’ll have the company you’ve always wanted to have.