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Hello,

I am a manager-entrepreneur having moved from entrepreneurial success to large and mid sized firms. My approach followed your model where I sought experiences in different industries. My goal was to put myself in challenging situations to test myself and grow. In each of my past three roles, I achieved growth levels far in excess of industry veterans because I created new markets and enhanced product and service offerings rather just completed in a business as usual kind of way. Educationally, I just completed a MBA to add to my masters in law. I am just starting to look for my next challenge but I am finding that fixed mindset thinking seems to now dominate the hiring process of established firms. My guess is that this is a result of new hiring systems and the use of profiles to filter candidates. Profiles tend to favor people with a conservative career management approach (single industry, brand name employers etc). It is very likely that I will return to an entrepreneurial environment, not because it is necessarily the place where I can get the best results, but because the bias in established firms against the growth mindset that you discuss is almost insurmountable. Interested in your thoughts.

Dr. Wiltbank, much of my work with organizations has been in helping individual managers and leaders understand their behavioral style and how it influences their management approach and actions. The characteristics your research revealed correlate well with the four behavioral styles (driver, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness). Your Virtuous Cycle reflects behavioral characteristics of the driver/influence style combination while your Vicious Cycle reflects behavioral characteristics of the steadiness/conscientiousness style combination. I would recommend managers increase their self-awareness of their style preferences to better understand their "proclivities." This greater self-awareness will help them better understand how they can get in their own way of becoming growth leaders and what are the new behaviors they need to learn to contribute to the organic growth of their company.

Thanks for your research.

Sincerely,
Brian Tolle
www.tollegroup.com
www.corporatexray.com

The problem you describe is definitely common in large organizations. It may sound obvious, but managers on paper are a lot different than managers "on the ground." One of the places that we hope our work on growth leaders will really resonate is with HR and people involved in selecting and promoting talent. The mix of backgrounds and experience that you describe is down the path of growth leaders. I think the challenge for organizations is the uncertainty of knowing how your mix of experiences can relate to what they perceive as growth opportunities. Also, organizations generally hire for existing positions in main lines of business rather than for novel activities in new lines of business. As a result, they struggle to attract the kind of growth leadership talent that they may need, and that it sounds like you bring to the table.

I was a mid level executive at a pharmaceutical company in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Twice I led a team that grew otherwise "dead" businesses from about $50 million in annual sales to north of $500 million in annual revenue. However, I always felt like a "freak show" while I was there. On one hand, the senior leadership loved the results and issued "faint praise" or slightly worse. At the same time, functionaries in Human Resources (representing the Leadership) issued warnings to me about not offending the culture (whatever that meant) and the dangers of "moving too fast". Were they with the union or something? On one occasion, the company announced they were looking for "trailblazers" to "generate real top line revenue" which made sense since they had 90% gross margins. However, the amount of grief doled out on the "trailblazers" was almost constant. At one meeting, I announced "you can tell the trailblazers around here. They have arrows in the front from the savages and bullets in the back from the settlers". I left and made a fortune running start up companies. I made more in many years than all the combined years at the pharmaceutical company. I certainly never made less. Thats why the pharmaceutical industry is struggling with innovation. All the trailblazers are dead.

As a headhunter and career coach I suggest that you think through every industry niche that turns you on, and for which you might have invaluable solutions. Look first for the specific work where you have a lot of passion. Then, narrow businesses down based on that criteria; plus your most favorable locations. Don't sweat corporations vs entrepreneurs, go where you passion is.

Roy A. Bobo II
RB Consulting

Rob, I'm curious if your research found any correlation between the cycles and the size of the organization. Do small businesses attract more people in the Virtuous Cycle?

I'm also wondering if you found a relationship between the Virtuous and the Vicious not only in how they each saw career risk, but the attitude each has toward education and self-improvement, in general.

Best regards,

________________________
John Fox, President
www.venturemarketing.com

Author, Marketing Playbook: The Definitive Guide to B2B Marketing
Endorsed by: Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Rieva Lesonsky, Al Ries, Ben McConnell and many other thought-leaders!
www.marketing-playbook.com

LinkedIn profile & endorsements: www.linkedin.com/in/johnfox

Come work for ESPN. Seriously. We want these elusive budding leaders. I head up the digital media/technology side of ESPN business affairs, and have two open heads. A well-trained draftsperson (2-7yrs experience), with a passion for technology and sports, the ability to navigate, diplomatically, corporate hierarchies, both here and with partners, an upbeat attitude and curiosity to boot -- that's a dynamic combination. If you're reading this board and you are this person, or know of someone, please send me an email: frank.golding@espn.com.

Dear Professor Wiltbank,

I was heartened to see your "In Search of Growth Leaders" article in the WSJ as it's good to see this topic getting attention. I've argued for some time that organic growth is less risky/more predictable and ultimately more manageable than M&A growth or market growth. We've also quantitatively shown that it is a great predictor of shareholder returns. Ultimately, organic growth is the manifestation of management's ability to extract growth from their core business through their decision-making skills. As a result, I was pretty excited to see that this method of generating growth was getting its due.

But unfortunately for me, the arguments you presented didn't resonate with our experience generating organic growth previously as part of large, complex organizations and now as we advise clients on this. Instead of arguing for improved management processes to deliver organic growth, your argument that it is a handful of managerial beliefs, talents and behaviors that drive organic growth is not consistent with our observations of what works.

While I wouldn't argue that having capable managers at the helm of a business is not important or desirable, the idea that organic growth is driven by recruitment of the right managers possessing "vision, leadership and entrepreneurial talents" makes organic growth appear much more elusive than it need be.

Based on our experience working with organizations seeking organic growth, here is what needs to happen:

1. Organizations must first understand that resource allocation decisions, e.g., investments and projects in marketing, R&D, sales, operations, innovation, etc are what drive organic growth and that they generally have too many ideas and not enough funding
2. Because of this resource constraint, they need a way to better determine the selection and prioritization of organic growth projects instead of typical personality and politically-driven decision criteria. This can be done by forcing the quantification of these investments in a more data-driven way. By understanding the strategic, financial and risk benefits and risks of these projects in a consistent and rigorous way, the projects can be considered against one another and selections can be made that leverage data. I'm not arguing the decisions be made on the basis of a spreadsheet but am calling for decisions that balance analytical and intuition led decision making. This is very contrary to the article which seems to push for more intuition-led, decibel-driven decisioning based on the 'prowess' of the manager. This is already the norm in most organizations and doesn't need to be exacerbated.
3. Creating projections for these investments is obviously not enough as creating fancy, elaborate models are always wrong. The point is not to create perfect projections which is a fool's task but to create a mechanism for always improving projections. As the business adage goes, "What gets measured gets managed" and so the critical step at this point is to actually close the loop on these investments and determine which delivered and which did not, e.g., which were achieved in the costs outlined and which delivered the financial benefits, # of customers, etc that they outlined.
4. Taking this promise versus performance data, we can use the results to inform future year projections. Our projections are still not perfect but they are continuously improving and with this, the organization's ability to select the right projects to deliver organic growth is also improving.

With all this information, we're actually able to objectively determine who the best managers are based on information and not abstract and nebulous determinations of vision and leadership capabilities. These managers' practices and ideas can be shared across the organization, and the managers themselves can be put into positions of greater responsibility. At the same time, those managers unable to deliver are exposed and corrective action can be taken.

Creating organic growth is possible in a systematic way, and it should be treated as a strategic and managerial discipline the organization can continuously improve through consistent attention and management. Pegging your hopes for organic growth on a few 'gifted' leaders and their abilities is not the way for an organization to consistently generate organic growth.

I am still glad to see your article and the fact that organic growth is coming to the forefront in a publication of this stature, but it appears that a lot more can be done to create an understanding of what drives organic growth.

Warm regards,
Anand Sanwal
www.brilliont.com
Investile Dysfunction blog - http://brilliont.com/blogs/id/
asanwal@brilliont.com