Advice for CEOs

In today’s extraordinarily dynamic business climate, companies face many fast emerging challenges from an ever more complex and interdependent marketplace. The shelf life of successful strategies, brands and products is constantly diminishing, requiring faster, iterative product development cycles. The destabilizing forces of technology and globalization mean that every disruptive business model is a starting point for someone else to develop the next one. All this challenges a business owner’s ability to plot out a course and stick to it.

In the first part of this article, I discussed why creating a culture of leadership is critical for a company looking to scale their business. Coaching, mentoring and teaching are the development activities that help employees translate strategy into action. Empowered teams understand how their role contributes to the company’s competitive advantage and success in the marketplace. They are a great source of leverage to drive growth in profits faster than growth in revenue. Despite what “process engineering” and IT consultants will typically tell you, most process glitches and production bottlenecks are individual choke points - not system errors or the result of inadequate IT. Scale is not a production issue, a technology issue, or a money issue. It is a leadership issue.

Each time Newport Board Group helps companies create alignment around the Four M’s (Market, Management, Model, and Money), we revisit the basic principle that Management begins with leadership from the top. Companies trying to move up the growth curve face complex transitions and organization development challenges. One of the most important transitions is creating leadership that can scale - to drive the organization to its next plateau, without the cost, disruption and potential risk of bringing in a new CEO or other member of the top team.