Is it time to challenge your assumptions on growth
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Each month I use this newsletter to provoke your thinking about a timely topic. My goal is the challenge you to surface and challenge your assumptions about what's possible.
Is it Time to Challenge Your Assumption about Growth?
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A number of years ago a CEO and I were having dinner. She complained to me how her company's growth was stagnating around 2%. She said she needed to jumpstart the firm's growth to 4%. I said, "That's great, why not 10%?" Puzzled, she said, "I will be happy with 4%." What felt like a broken record, I repeated, "why not 10%?" Growing annoyed, she snapped back, "I don't think 10% is possible."
Somewhere between 4% and 10% a stretch goal turned impossible. The rest of the evening I explored her assumptions about the business that made 10% impossible. We discovered three areas of constraining assumptions (customer behavior, product development and organization execution) that restricted her view of growth.
Left unchallenged, these assumptions would be fixed limits to growth. The key to jumpstarting her business growth was, first, to identify the business rules and operating assumptions that limited what was possible and, second, to identify the source of each assumption, question their validity and explore what it would take to remove them as barriers to growth.
Pushing the Edge of Your Thinking
- Who defines what's possible for growth in your organization?
- What revenue growth for next year do you consider: stretch but seasonable, highly unlikely and impossible?
- What are the critical assumptions about your business that define your view of growth possibility?
- If you were to challenge and overcome the barriers posed by those assumptions, what possibility might get revealed?
- Would you rather beat a safe goal or fall just short of a higher, aggressive goal?
Feel free to share this mailing with your friends and colleagues.
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