Organizational Growth Quotes

Not just the organizational structure but the management style can also affect your business goals of success and growth.

Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Growth responds to Structure whether organizational or personal. Build a structure for your life if you must grow

Leadership growth always precedes organizational growth.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

Accountability is not a consequence. In order for it to become your competitive advantage, you must be willing to change what you expect from yourself and others.

Ensure that value is created for all stakeholders – customers, employees, partners, society, and investors – simultaneously

If you can move people by inspiring and building their confidence to own and drive your new strategy, they will be committed to seeing change through and overcoming the organizational constraints you confront.

Real growth comes only after the dark night of the soul, when they feel they don’t have what it takes and choose to persist, to reflect on themselves, learn from their mistakes, and struggle to apply what they’ve learned.

In the words of organizational guru Charles Handy, “The companies that survive are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world—not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy.”22

Business can be a wonderful vehicle for both personal and organizational learning and growth. I have experienced many more awakenings as Whole Foods has grown and evolved over the past three decades. We will share some of these throughout the book. Most importantly, I have learned that life is short and that we are simply passing through here. We cannot stay. It is therefore essential that we find guides whom we can trust and who can help us discover and realize our higher purposes in life before it is too late. In my early twenties, I made what has proven to have been a wise decision: a lifelong commitment to follow my heart wherever it led me—which has been on a wonderful journey of adventure, purpose, creativity, growth, and love. I have come to understand that it is possible to live in this world with an open, loving heart. I have learned that we can channel our deepest creative impulses in loving ways toward fulfilling our higher purposes, and help evolve the world to a better place.

A DDO represents, instead, a rethinking of the very place of people development in organizational life. What if a company did everything within its power to create the conditions for individuals to overcome their own internal barriers to change, to take stock of and transcend their own blind spots, and to see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth?

The critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of organizational practices that will become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. Interestingly enough, those new practices eventually sow the seeds of their own decay and lead to another period of revolution. Managers, therefore, experience the irony of seeing a major solution in one period become a major problem in a later period.

Amy Wrzesniewski, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, has been studying a classification system that can help you recognize your orientation toward your work and attain greater job satisfaction. She defines work in three ways: 1.​A JOB is a way to pay the bills. It’s a means to an end, and you have little attachment to it. 2.​A CAREER is a path toward growth and achievement. Careers have clear ladders for upward mobility. 3.​A CALLING is work that is an important part of your life and provides meaning. People with a calling are generally more satisfied with the work they do.

Linking the digital and physical worlds in these ways will have profound implications for both. But this future won’t be realized unless the Internet of Things learns from the history of the Internet. The open standards and decentralized design of the Internet won out over competing proprietary systems and centralized control by offering fewer obstacles to innovation and growth. This battle has resurfaced with the proliferation of conflicting visions of how devices should communicate. The challenge is primarily organizational, rather then technological, a contest between command-and-control technology and distributed solutions. The Internet of Things demands the latter, and openness will eventually triumph.

Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety.

you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it. The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands. My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job.

The empowerment triangle turns drama upside-down, transforming the persecutor (or scapegoat) into a challenger, the rescuer into a coach, and the victim into a creator. The empowerment dynamic allows all the roles to be essential for growth. In the drama triangle, the persecutor works with issues of power, the rescuer works with issues of responsibility, and the victim works with area of vulnerability: The drama triangle is familiar to many of us. We all know this pattern inside ourselves. We get stuck in a situation that we want to escape, and it creates drama. By leaning into the dynamic and entering deeper into relationship, we can work the energy so that it becomes an enriching transformation. If you can work this in a group, then you’ve subdued the scapegoat archetype and turned it into something more life affirming. The most important thing about the drama triangle is to make people aware of it. When a group can understand and recognize how this is a kind of destructive pattern, it becomes empowered to change the pattern. Uncoupling drama from our organizational and personal lives is the key. The group as a whole can embody a role to create safety and make sense of the system. Transformation from the drama to the redeemed starts with a pause, then an inquiry of what’s happening here, then a recollection of the three roles and who is playing what role in this context. Once the system is self-aware, ask the questions: “what else is possible? How can I become so centered that something new can happen? How can a new perception take place?” With enough safety and connection, the group will be able to follow the healing energy into re-organization and re-integration of the parts. Claiming or remembering your own archetype can protect against falling into one.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

explores how Netscape managers built a company on Internet time. Netscape’s success came from its quickness to take advantage of emerging growth opportunities in and around the Internet and from its organizational flexibility. We believe the following principles capture the core lessons of Netscape’s spectacular rise:

To be truly strategic, CIOs need to think about how value is created. Many are good at cost cutting, but this is almost by definition a backward looking exercise—optimizing something that is already in place. This is not strategic. CIOs need to think about what future possibilities there are to leverage technology for new value and top-line growth. This is what differentiates the strategic CIO.11

A Sales Professional To significantly increase sales, expand market share, and provide unparalleled levels of customer service to contribute to organizational growth and profit objectives

A Sales Professional To significantly increase sales, expand market share, and provide unparalleled levels of customer service to contribute to organizational growth and profit objectives Perform in-depth market analysis and create growth plans Lead generation, networking, and relationship building Demonstrate high-impact presentation and closing skills Assess client needs, and effectively overcome objections to sale Establish new territories and turn around underperforming ones Initiate new product/service launch Identify and capitalize on new and existing business opportunities Provide groundbreaking levels of customer service

The structures and initial conditions that are required for successful growth are enumerated in the chapters of this book. They include starting with a cost structure in which attractive profits can be earned at low price points and which can then be carried up-market; being in a disruptive position relative to competitors so that they are motivated to flee rather than fight; starting with a set of customers who had been nonconsumers so that they are pleased with modest products; targeting a job that customers are trying to get done; skating to where the money will be, not to where it was; assigning managers who have taken the right courses in the school of experience and putting them to work within processes and organizational values that are attuned to what needs to be done; having the flexibility to respond as a viable strategy emerges; and starting with capital that can be patient for growth. If you start in conditions such as these, you do not need to see deeply into the future. Attractive choices that lead to success will present themselves. It is when you start in conditions that are opposite to these that attractive options may not appear, and the right choices will be difficult to make.

To be sure, the numbers on the far right had grown. Membership in the Liberty League, the anti–New Deal corollary to the Tea Party during the 1930s, has been estimated at 75,000, while membership in the John Birch Society in the 1960s has been estimated at 100,000 core members. Overall, at its height, 5 percent of Americans approved of the John Birch Society. The Tea Party movement, in contrast, was estimated by The New York Times to have won the support of 18 percent of the population at its zenith, but at its core, according to the researcher Devin Burghart, were some 330,000 activists who had signed up with six national organizational networks. If the estimates were correct, the actual number of hard-core Tea Party activists was not, by historical standards, all that large. But the professionalization of the underground infrastructure, the growth of sympathetic and in some cases subsidized media outlets, and the concentrated money pushing the message from the fringe to center stage were truly consequential.

English exports, led by cotton textiles, doubled between 1780 and 1800. It was the growth in this sector that pulled ahead the whole economy. The combination of technological and organizational innovation provides the model for economic progress that transformed the economies of the world that became rich.

The Five Initiatives 1.​Growth (via customer service, globalization, and technology) 2.​Productivity (went hand-in-hand with growth) 3.​Cash (improve working capital and have high-quality earnings) 4.​People (keep the best talent, organized the right way and motivated) 5.​Organizational enablers (including Six Sigma, Honeywell Operating System, and Functional Transformation)

Unfortunately, companies that become large and successful find that maintaining growth becomes progressively more difficult. The math is simple: A $40 million company that needs to grow profitably at 20 percent to sustain its stock price and organizational vitality needs an additional $8 million in revenues the first year, $9.6 million the following year, and so on; a $400 million company with a 20 percent targeted growth rate needs new business worth $80 million in the first year, $96 million in the next, and so on; and a $4 billion company with a 20 percent goal needs to find $800 million, $960 million, and so on, in each successive year.

Public disclosure supports an organization’s values and strengthens the organization itself. An organization should consider making personnel decisions more public. When people are dismissed or specifically not promoted because of bad behavior, it should be more public. There is a value to having public signals when behavior is not acceptable. Conversely, culture carriers, those that represent the values, even if they may not be the firm’s biggest revenue producers, must be promoted as a signal of what’s important.11 Generating dissonance or perplexing situations that provoke innovative inquiry can create competitive advantages and improve performance. Having some sort of interdependence should help create an environment that supports discussion and debate. Complementing this debate is balance between groups. Getting the input of leaders from different areas or regions, who have worked together and have good working relationships, is also important in encouraging dissonance. At the board level, in many situations, an independent lead director or independent chairman can add to dissonance. A sense of higher purpose, beyond making money in a materialistic society, can help people make sense of their roles. A firm needs to give employees a clear understanding of its values, its social purpose, and its sense of responsibility. However, leaders need to be conscious of not using the good works of their employees or of the firm to rationalize behavior that is inconsistent with its principles. An organization’s culture is transmitted from one generation to the next as new group members become acculturated or socialized. It is crucial to recruit people who have the same values and socialize them into the firm’s culture. Even if this restricts growth in the short run, it is important not to undervalue recruiting, interviewing, training, mentoring, and socializing. This is also very important in international

But if we give up when we fail, or if we edit out our mistakes, we halt our progress no matter how smart we are. It is the Growth Mindset fused with an enlightened evolutionary system that helps to unlock our potential; it is the framework that drives personal and organizational adaptation.

Emotional generosity is when an individual or organization combines empathy—the willingness to feel, understand, and share another person’s experiences and emotions—and sacrifice, surren- dering something you need or desire so that someone else can have it. The result of combining these two attributes is trust: the belief that someone or something is good, honest, and reliable. And when someone trusts you, they’re willing to emotionally connect with you. That connection, that bond, is invaluable, both in personal relationships and organizational loyalty and growth. When people feel trust and connection, they allow themselves to be taken on a journey, and that’s what makes it possible to create something truly special.

As we begin the new century, we know that our success will depend on how well we change and manage the firm’s rapid growth. That requires a willingness to abandon old practices and discover new and innovative ways of conducting business. Everything is subject to change—everything but the values we live by and stand for: teamwork, putting clients’ interests first, integrity, entrepreneurship and excellence.

Goldman’s response to the various pressures in a dynamic environment—in particular, rapid growth—made it even more difficult to notice that the firm was drifting away from its traditional interpretation of its principles.

Goldman’s response to the various pressures in a dynamic environment—in particular, rapid growth—made it even more difficult to notice that the firm was drifting away from its traditional interpretation of its principles. The rapid growth, combined with multiple, conflicting organizational goals, resulted in a series of many small everyday decisions happening so quickly that most people didn’t notice (or were too busy to notice, or didn’t care).

When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese. For example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels—no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket. Within a short time, he’s promoted. Golden eggs! But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance. Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and profit. The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization—the customers and the employees. I

The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and competition in the marketplace.

is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the “official” organizational charts of companies represents the actuality of what the real operational network structures are. Who is really communicating with whom, how often are they doing it, how much do they exchange, and so on? What is really needed is access to all of the company’s communication channels, such as the phone calls, the e-mails, the meetings, et cetera, quantified analogously to the cell phone data we used for helping to develop a science of cities.

It’s between $1 million and $10 million that the team needs to focus on cash. Growth sucks cash, and since this is the first time the company will make a tenfold jump in size, the demands for cash will soar. In addition, at this stage of organizational development, the company is still trying to figure out its unique position in the marketplace, and these experiments (or mistakes) can be costly. This is when the cash model of the business needs to be worked out (e.g., “How is the business model going to generate sufficient cash for the company to keep growing?”).

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

In one of his first exploits, he called into Nokia from his own mobile phone and pretended to be a senior executive at the company. By studying the organizational chart and learning some detailed facts about the company, he was able to persuade someone in the IT department of his falsified identity. Mitnick claimed that he lost his copy of Nokia’s top mobile phone’s source code and needed it sent right away or he would be in big trouble. With this ruse, he was able to trick his mark into action. The loyal and unsuspecting employee complied, and within 15 minutes, Mitnick had the most important and confidential intellectual property of a multinational conglomerate.

In 2004, I was working toward my master’s in organizational development at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and decided to write my thesis on the effectiveness of life coaching. Two years of extensive research with almost one hundred former US Senate interns showed what I already knew from personal experience. Regardless of age, gender, level of self-awareness, or degree, three months of coaching increased their life satisfaction and improved their personal growth. The key conclusions that emerged from this study include: •Life coaching makes a significant difference in overall life satisfaction. •Coaching is an effective approach to goal attainment and personal development. •Coaching helps clients be more effective in setting concrete, measurable goals instead of being overwhelmed by large tasks. •Asking challenging questions encourages the client to look at a problem in new, creative ways. I knew coaching was effective, and this research proved it.

This can have devastating consequences for the fast-growing company. Over a short period of time, say a year, the number of employees can leap from 50 to 150 in a startup, or from 150 to 500 or more during a later phase of rapid growth when the business model is promising and the funding is in the bank. Seemingly overnight, the new employees can vastly outnumber their predecessors, and this dynamic can permanently redefine the corporate culture. Brent Gleeson, a leadership coach and Navy SEAL combat veteran, writes, “Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”2

An organization that does not implement learning and development initiatives, is an organization that is a sinking titanic, an inevitable shipwreck left behind.

Green Projects Consulting provides a variety of services such as project portfolio management trainings, project portfolio management strategy and project portfolio management implementation services. Furthermore we have extensive experience in building value driven PMOs, organizational transformation, change management and advanced project management applying critical chain project management and TOC principles to achieve exceptional growth for our clients.

In most business books, the role of the CEO boils down to a small number of key responsibilities. The CEO: Sets the overall direction and strategy of the company and communicates this direction regularly to employees, customers, investors, etc. Hires, trains, and allocates company employees against this overall direction while maintaining company culture. Raises and/or allocates capital against this overall direction. Acts as chief psychologist of the company. Founders are often surprised by the extent to which people and organizational issues start to dominate their time.

Understanding that the change we’re experiencing is accelerating is half the battle

Execute your own shift and create a future with more value for your customers and stakeholders.

How can you think differently about your production system or supply chain, and shrink its footprint?

What needs to change in order for your products to stay in use forever?

Where can you be extraordinary? What commitment can you make to solve a huge problem for the masses?

What can you gamify to make it more fun, addictive, and effective?

What needs to change in your company to maximize value for all stakeholders, making your shares rock-solid for the next decades?

What connection can you facilitate around moments in the lives of consumers?

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

After all, business model innovation is about finding new combinations from existing business model elements, enhanced elements, and completely new elements.

Overnight success does not exist.

Successfully shifting business models is tough and requires guts and perseverance.

Innovating is hard work and the journey to success is a long and rocky road

After all, shifting business models is about customers

Access, not ownership

Whatever you’re producing, at the end of the day, your customers only care about getting a job done

Companies die because they’ve become fixated on fighting for their current business model rather than shifting to a more relevant one

To succeed, you must adopt a mindset that is open to exploration and continually searches for (unmet) customer needs and contextual changes in the business, technology, regulatory, and competitive landscape

Shifts start as small moves inside an existing business model that evolve into entirely new ways of creating value and relevance

Create new ways to reach your customers

The ultimate purpose of a company is to create amazing value for customers and all of its stakeholders. With so much value created, a company is way more profitable in the long term

Customers first, always

Whether the grand challenge you plan to address is global in nature or affects only your industry, what’s clear is this: if you don’t address it, someone else will

The journey towards a successful business model shift is often littered with uncertainty and failures

A clear vision must be developed in order to inspire, motivate, and activate people to move the business forward together

Innovation requires the right talent and mindset from both leadership and innovators themselves

Enable your organization to delight customers in the long term

Following the practice of the times, the grand princes and, later, the kings of Poland acquired the right of patronage; that is, they could appoint Orthodox bishops and even the metropolitan himself. Thus, the crucial issue of the leadership of the Orthodox faithful was left in the hands of secular rulers of another, increasingly antagonistic, church… The results were disastrous. With lay authorities capable of appointing bishops, the metropolitan's authority was undermined. And with every bishop acting as a law unto himself, the organizational discipline of the Orthodox church deteriorated rapidly. Even more deleterious was the corruption that lay patronage engendered… Under the circumstances, Orthodoxy's cultural contributions were limited. Schools, once one of the church's most attractive features, were neglected. Unqualified teachers barely succeeded in familiarizing their pupils with the rudiments of reading, writing, and Holy Scriptures. The curriculum of the schools had changed little since medieval times. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 added to the intellectual and cultural stagnation by depriving the Orthodox of their most advanced and inspiring model. Lacking both external and internal stimuli, Orthodox culture slipped into ritualism, parochialism, and decay. The Poles, meanwhile, were enjoying a period of cultural growth and vitality. Benefiting from the West's prodigious outbursts of creative energy, they experienced the Renaissance with its stimulating reorientation of thought.

Toxic leadership is a silent destroyer, poisoning the very essence of organizational health and stifling individual growth and potential.

Businesses that embrace international markets as early as possible often see faster growth rates and other competitive advantages.

Because international expansion today happens faster than ever, your company needs a global vision from the earliest possible stage of growth.

Culture, as we know it, is like a hidden river that courses beneath the surface of an organization. Its currents, strong yet silent, dictate the ebb and flow of organizational life, guiding behaviors, shaping perceptions, and influencing interactions. These undercurrents are coded with shared beliefs, values, and norms, inscribed not in explicit policies but in unwritten rules, subtle cues, and tacit understandings.

Applying a systems perspective to your life would mean managing all the parts as a unified whole to achieve your mission. It also means ensuring that all the various parts of your life work together in a fully interconnected, unified, and mutually beneficial manner. Compartmentalization is out, just as silos are frowned on in corporations. You may have heard about breaking down organizational silos. Now, it’s time to break down the silos within yourself.

Entrepreneurs who succeed in employing and promoting the right people for the work within their business and in establishing an appropriate corporate organizational surrounding create the conditions for healthy growth.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

At the organizational level, this value can take the form of acquiring the capacity to sustain ongoing evaluative inquiry. This outcome is more likely when participants experience evaluation as a meaningful and productive way to enhance patterns of work and communication. Participatory, collaborative, appreciative, and empowering mechanisms are often at the heart of evaluations where process use is a high priority. These mechanisms can promote stakeholder ownership of the evaluation processes and products and thus enhance process use, as well as use of evaluation findings. For some organizations, evaluation capacity building means that evaluation stakeholders learn how to work effectively with external evaluators. This organizational learning further facilitates the contributions that external evaluation processes and findings can make to the organization’s growth and productivity.

Just because someone says they need you to do something, it doesn’t mean you have to do it. It might be better for their growth if they do it. You aren’t letting others down by taking care of yourself.

Aaron: I think it doesn’t make sense until there’s some sort of inflection from a growth standpoint. The idea is not to hand a COO random busywork from around the company. Instead, consider some key criteria: Are you scaling at a rate where your own time is now spent primarily on pure operational activities—like hiring and building up goal-setting structures and performance reviews and helping people with organizational issues and process? Is that pulling you away from things like your product strategy and product design or working with customers, for instance? You have to solve all those problems either way, and at some point in the inflection curve, it just makes more sense to get a partner to help you with the operational stuff.

But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

Based on Better Work's experience with hundred's of enterprises, there have emerged 5 critical areas of conversation between manager and contributor 1- goal setting and reflection - where the employee's OKR plan are set for the upcoming cycle. The discussion focuses on how best to align individual objectives and key results with organizational priorities. 2- ongoing progress updates, which are brief, data-driven check-ins based on the employee's real-time progress with problem-solving as needed. Progress updates really entail two basic questions - what's going well and what's not working well 3 - two-way coaching to help contributors to reach their potential and managers do a better job 4- career growth to develop skills, identify growth opportunities and expand employee's vision of their future at the company 5- light-weight performance reviews. A feedback mechanism to gather input, and summarize what the employee has accomplished since the last meeting in the context of the organization's needs. And note this conversation is held apart from the employee's annual compensation performance review.

Companies are living creatures. They have their personas, a company can be vibrant, can be old & stubborn, can be adventurous & risk taker, it can be anything & everything, depending on its employees & the management profound believes of growth & organizational justice

CEO commitment is the starting point. In India, winning requires a very different business leader—an entrepreneurial general manager rather than a salesperson and, ideally, a senior and trusted insider with credibility and influence. It requires a different organizational structure or model, where India is managed like a geographic profit center, with the ability to make important operating decisions without enormous negotiations and persuasion. It needs a willingness to make long-term investments in developing capabilities on the ground and the willingness to sustain these through the inevitable vicissitudes. Therefore, escaping the midway trap requires the commitment of the entire leadership of the company to pull multiple levers before the whole organization flips to a new high-growth trajectory.

Consequences Culturally, we have drifted away from accountability in this country for at least the last generation and perhaps longer. The consequences have been more dire than most people realize. —Richard Chambers

Being a transformational leader increases productivity and bottom line results whether people decide to stay or go because the motivation to succeed is internally based on individual growth not externally based on organizational goals.

Dialogue reminds us that we can question to build, not only to doubt or deconstruct.

Good to Great and Built to Last, both by Jim Collins, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish, and a bunch of books by Patrick Lencioni: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Death by Meeting, and Five Dysfunctions of the Team: A Leadership Fable.

it’s critical that an organization approach the freed capacity that is realized through process time reductions in a way that enables growth rather than viewing it as a labor reduction exercise that leads to layoffs.

What to Do with Freed Capacity Freeing capacity is a vital way for labor-intensive organizations to increase the proportion of revenue to labor. The effort, though, should not result in layoffs. Rather, freeing capacity enables an organization to accomplish one or more of the following outcomes: Absorb additional work without increasing staff Reduce paid overtime Reduce temporary or contract staffing In-source work that’s currently outsourced Create better work/life balance by reducing hours worked Slow down and think Slow down and perform higher-quality work with less stress and higher safety Innovate; create new revenue streams Conduct continuous improvement activities Get to know your customers better (What do they really value?) Build stronger supplier relationships Coach staff to improve their critical thinking and problem-solving skills Mentor staff to create career growth opportunities Provide cross-training to create greater organizational flexibility and enhance job satisfaction Do the things you haven’t been able to get to; get caught up Build stronger interdepartmental and interdivisional relationships to improve collaboration Reduce payroll through natural attrition

Organizational leaders often accept and act on two fundamental assumptions. One is that market boundaries and industry conditions are given. You cannot change them. You have to build your strategy based on them. 4 The other is that, to succeed within these environmental constraints, an organization must make a strategic choice between differentiation and low cost. Either it can deliver greater value to customers at a greater cost and hence a higher price, or it can deliver reasonable value at a lower cost. But it can’t do both. Hence, the essence of strategy is seen as making a value-cost trade-off.