Category Archives: Leadership

High-growth companies are particularly prone to fire fighting. People rush from crisis to crisis; not ending one before another pops up. Real problem solving is replaced with Band Aids. Productivity slides. Managing becomes a constant juggling act of deciding where to assign overworked people and which developing crisis can be ignored until tomorrow.

When a company is young and beginning to grow it’s simple – it’s “us versus the world.” Then the company gets bigger, more people and layers are added, the shared culture gets diluted, and the tendency shifts toward internal competition, political infighting, and aggressive protection of self-interests. It’s a theme that appears in all growing organizations, and smart leaders recognize that "us versus them" behavior will ultimately destroy a company.

Growing companies tend to be full of uncertainty and ambiguity caused by constantly changing employees, job demands, structures, systems, products, and markets. Uncertainty can and does create problems.

Most people view luck in one of two ways, both at the extreme ends of the spectrum. First, some see luck as the explanation for extraordinary success. These people see big winners as those that beat the odds; they see winning as random chance. The second view is that luck plays no role in success at all. Folks in this camp see skill, preparation, determination, and hard work as the reasons for success. People with this view totally dismiss the role luck played in their success and take every bit of the credit themselves.

This is the final post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. If attaining growth is hard, then sustaining it is even harder. After successfully scaling the company, your organization must make sure that it is able to sustain its growth over the long term.

This is the fourth post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. The Rapid Growth stage is where the organization’s past and future collide. On the surface, the only apparent difference between a start-up and a large company is the amount of revenue and market share. But it’s not that simple.

This is the third post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. The Early Growth stage builds on the company’s success in Stage One. The company has established a perfect fit between its product and the needs of the market, developed a sales process, and identified a set of initial pilot customers that can serve as valuable references. Now it’s time to launch the company and focus on sales. The primary objective of the Early Growth Stage...

This is the second post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. Every new venture begins with a vision about a great new product or service, how it will reach its customers, and why a lot of people are going to buy it. To turn the vision into reality – and a profitable company, founders must test their assumptions about the market and potential customers, and turn them into facts. The biggest mistake most young companies make...

This is the first post in a five part series introducing the stages of business growth. Can you imagine trying to build a skyscraper without a blueprint? Can you imagine taking a trip to an unfamiliar place without a roadmap or GPS? Probably not, yet leading a fast-growing company can seem a lot like traveling through uncharted territory. The best and fastest path may not be clear. You need to know what lies ahead, beyond the horizon. Unfortunately, most leaders of growing...

My last post discussed the multitude of problems that arise from a lack of candor in organizations. But simply asking people to be more candid without a supporting organizational culture is futile. The concept of candor is simple, but being honest inside of organizations is difficult. It’s hard because you are fighting against human nature and established organizational behaviors. People avoid conflict, engage in groupthink, tell their bosses what they think they want to hear, withhold feedback, hoard information, and ignore reality...