Growth is Much More than Just a Strategy: It's a System

Abstract

This note states that growth research demonstrates that growth is much more than a strategy and it happens when the right kind of leadership, internal environment and processes come together to create a small-company-entrepreneurial soul in a large-company body. The Growth System Assessment Tool that illuminates the presence of growth inhibitors, nonalignment, and bad growth behaviors is discussed, and students are provided with a mini-assessment model of this tool to use to start thinking about how to create their own System for enabling and promoting growth mindsets and behaviors. Excerpt UVA-S-0197 Rev. Oct. 10, 2011 Growth Is Much More Than Just a Strategy: It's A System Growth research has demonstrated that growth is much more than a strategy. Growth happens when the right kind of leadership, internal environment and processes come together to create a small-company-entrepreneurial soul in a large-company body. Growth requires experimental processes, an entrepreneurial mindset, iterative entrepreneurial learning, leadership that accepts entrepreneurial failures, and internal processes that mitigate the natural proclivities of human beings and organizations that inhibit growth. Growth is not a linear or reductionist process. It is a human process that is modeled better by biology and complexity theory than economics or physics. Growth is a change process that requires experimentation, learning and taking measured risks that can result in mistakes and failures—that contravenes the purpose of an organization, which is to produce standardization, predictability, reliability, and consistency. Growth requires the right mindsets, organizational environment, and processes. The mindsets, organizational environment, and processes that enable growth are different from the mindsets, internal environment, and processes that facilitate exploitative execution. That is the challenge—to manage those tensions or differences so that the result is both excellent growth exploration and exploitative execution. . . .