Expansion stage CEOs are some of the loneliest people in the world at work.  I wrote about the lonely CEO recently and I also wrote about what the lonely CEO can do about it.  The senior managers in an expansion stage company can also help quite a lot by recognizing the issue and working hard to help your CEO build the business. 

Senior managers working for the CEO should be like Alan.  Alan worked for me when I was a young manager.  He wasn't the smartest guy that ever worked for me.  He didn't work the highest number of hours.  But, Alan was one of the best people that ever worked for me.  What Alan did incredibly well was that he worked really hard at understanding the goals that I needed him to take responsibility for, and then he put all of his time against taking the responsibility and delivering on those needs.  When he completed the goal(s), he came back, reviewed the work, and then tried hard to understand what the next goals were.  Alan did this constantly without needlessly complicating my job by also taking responsibility for developing his working relationships with other managers and other departments and figuring out how to accomplish his goals rather than complicating my job with issues that he could resolve on his own or could resolve with the help of someone else. 

Alan offered up great ideas and approaches and alternative goals and we had good conversations about how to attack those goals.  But once his targets were locked and loaded, he was off to the races.  Alan's best characteristic was that he took full responsibility for the ultimate goals and always seemed to figure out how to realize the vast majority of them with minimal help from me.

As I wrote, Alan wasn't the smartest guy I ever worked with.  But, he was smart enough.  He didn't work the highest number of hours.  But, he worked hard enough.  His greatest strength was figuring out what needed to get done and then focused all of his time and attention on getting it done.  And, he did this without creating a lot of extra work for me or anyone else.

If you are a senior manager working for a CEO, do you take on major goals and get them done without much help from the CEO?  Does your CEO have peace of mind that you will accomplish the goal?  Or, is your goal one of the issues that keeps your CEO up at night? (if you are unsure, then ask!)

Additionally, do you create work for your CEO by bringing the CEO issues that you could resolve yourself or solve with the help of other managers?  Do you bring your own personal issues to the CEO more than you need to?  Do you distract the CEO with new ideas or issues that already have a forum for discussion and could be addressed more efficiently in that forum?

No doubt, the CEO that you work with is lonely (almost all are in one way or another whether they show it or not).  Your CEO can really use a partner that takes things off his or her plate and gets them done with little work from the CEO.  Doing this will also help move your company toward its aspirations faster and better.

One complication that you may find is that your CEO may have some "control freak" or "micromanager" characteristics (this is particularly true for many founding CEOs).  These characteristics were probably beneficial to the company at its early stages. But now that you are at the expansion stage the goals need to be set and then the senior team needs to accomplish them without a whole lot of help from the CEO, given that you are trying to increase your velocity and sophistication of company development. 

Your CEO may need some help with this and may need to be involved more with the first few goals that you take on yourself.  You may also need to have an open conversation and figure out how the CEO can get comfortable with you taking on more without the involvement of the CEO.  Yes, it is interesting that the CEO both needs you to be responsible for goals and at the same time has difficulty letting go of them.  If you really want to help your CEO, you will recognize the importance of overcoming this complication and then help the CEO overcome it!  With time and experience -- and with a few senior managers that act like Alan -- your CEO will recognize the benefits and be more and more comfortable letting go and allowing the senior team to take on more goals.

Think about it.  Then, do something about it!

Expansion Stage CEOs are lonely people.  It is the nature of the job that I wrote about it in a recent post.

What can the lonely CEO do?

My observations and discussions with hundreds of CEOs over time resulted in the following ways that CEOs can address the loneliness issue, which also results in them being better CEOs of better companies:

• Get one or two great senior management partners.  Some CEOs founded their companies with one or two great co-founders.  When this works, it works really well as the deep trust between co-founders that each have unique skills and experiences creates a really solid core for a young company and helps to spread the most important issues among more than just the CEO (note: clearly this does not always work and a lot has and could be written on dealing with the situations where this doesn't work or stops working).  If you don't currently have "partners", it is not too late.  Consider the skills that you most need in the company at this point and find a person that both fills the skill gap and has the experience, character, and chemistry that would make a great partner for you.  At OpenView, we encourage CEOs to get senior managers that would "fill a seat around the management table" to help our CEOs with this issue.

• Recruit one or two people that could serve as partners/mentors to your board.  CEOs that have one or two board members that can serve as deep sounding boards, provide some mentorship/partnership help and help to unite the company's board tend to have better experiences, better board meetings and better companies.  As with the senior management partner, the Board partner/mentor needs to have the right skill, experience, character and chemistry to make a good partner for you.  At OpenView, we encourage our portfolio companies to build the best board possible with as many independent board members as possible and also encourage our portfolio CEOs to find people that fit the profile but also have the right chemistry for the CEO.

• Find an outside mentor or two.  Similar in nature to finding a person to fill a board seat, finding a person or two that are willing to be unofficial or official senior advisors to you personally could be of great assistance.  There is also a growing group of "executive coaches" and I have heard some great feedback from a number of CEOs that believe that they have benefited greatly from their coaches.  Again, experience, skill and chemistry are really important for success.

• Join a group of other CEOs that you can connect with and learn from.  Many CEOs view this activity as a luxury, but the CEOs that I have spoken to who are actively involved with a group report that they get great advice from groups like this.  The group that gets mentioned the most is the Young Presidents Organization, but there are a lot of local CEO groups in every city to check out.  I have also heard examples of CEOs connecting in online forums in places like ExpertCEO or LinkedIn groups with some success.  At OpenView, we have quarterly in-person forums and workshops to both help management teams gain some great ideas, but also to network and find their counterparts at other portfolio companies that can help in a similar manner.

• Find the right Venture Capital Partner.  Venture Capitalists come in all shapes, sizes, personalities, characters, backgrounds and skills.  If you raise capital, try to find a VC with the right experience, skill, character and chemistry that could both serve the purpose of capitalizing your company and serve the purpose of being a true partner to you and your team.

• Ask a lot of questions, look for objective measures, and work hard to listen, sense and analyze to find the "truths".  As the CEO, you are most likely on the receiving end of a lot of filtered/biased information and perspectives.  The larger your company, the worse this issue generally gets.  Work hard to ask a lot of different people the same questions, listen hard, and try to triangulate the answers in a manner that helps you separate the signal from the noise.  Also, work hard to put objective measures/metrics in place to help you.  Objective measures are more difficult to filter/bias.

If you are a lonely CEO, consider the list above and determine if one or two of the ideas fit your context.  Then set a goal for doing at least one of them and put some time against exploring the possibilities.  Also, let your team, board, investors and network know about your goal so that they can open their networks to you and provide you some help.

If you are the CEO of an expansion stage company and you are lonely, then you are normal.  In my conversations with CEOs from hundreds of companies over time, most find that the role is a very lonely one.

Their are several issues that lead to this:

• The CEO has a board made up of several members, a management team and employee team that is made up of many members, and important customers and partners, many of whom were initially sold to by the CEO.  All look to the CEO as being the ultimate person to rely on.
• During the expansion stage, the company adds senior managers and other employees, and customers, all putting a toll on the organizational approaches for managing them.
• Throughout the expansion stage, the company continues to increase the differentiation of its products and its methodologies/processes for product development, customer development, and company development, most of which the CEO is not an expert in but needs to figure out in order to ensure that all the pieces fit together into a unique and valuable offering to the market while generating viable economic results.

This Expansion stage build is extremely difficult.  It was really difficult at the start-up stage and it will be difficult at the later growth stage, but the expansion stage tends to be the most difficult. 

From the outside, CEOs put on a confident face to the board, employees and customers and generally appear to be superheros.  From the inside, CEOs try to put the difficulties and distractions out of their mind and stay focused on achieving their most important short term goals. 

When CEOs that I work with are particularly stressed -- or when we are drinking a glass of our favorite alcoholic beverage -- I tell many of them my observations on CEOs, including this one.  My sense is that the idea is news to them...they see the outside superhero image of the other CEOs and don't realize that the other CEOs are struggling with the same type of issues.  The knowledge that they are sharing the same types of struggles with other CEOs helps them out quite a bit.

Ed Catmull is one of the most thoughtful senior managers who constantly strives to improve Pixar and its practices.  He approaches management in a manner that I would characterize as applying the principles of agile software development to film-making and company development.

In the video below, he gives a really great perspective of part of learning and applying several principles, including:

1. Iterative process- Review the material every day.

2. Constant Reviews to identify areas of improvement (a.k.a. Retrospectives, After-action reviews).

3. Trust- It must be safe for people to tell the truth.

4. Communication from anybody to anybody is key (communication should not only follow organizational structure).

5. People and how they function are more important than ideas (good people and practices will stimulate good ideas).

6. Do not let success mask problems.

7. Each product (movie) must be original (Jack Trout's primary message for two decades now to all companies in all industries has been around this point, differentiation and competitive positioning.  While this is not an agile product and development principle, perhaps it should be an agile company development principle and certainly should be a principle in the product management process.  It has certainly worked for Pixar!)

We apply the agile software principles to running our expansion stage venture capital firm and work closely with our portfolio companies to help them apply the principles to software development as well as other departments and their company overall.  It is great to see Pixar running with similar principles, particularly given its amazing run of successful movies!

Take a look at Ed's talk.  He is amazingly transparent, intellectually honest, and has a lot of great examples in his talk.  If you are a student of management, this relatively long talk is worth it!

Competitive Advantage is one of the most talked about areas of business growth strategies.  Agile Product Development creates competitive advantage and is one of the major business growth strategies for expansion stage technology companies.  Simply put, your development team can create better software faster with agile practices and your team will enjoy the approach better than the traditional waterfall approach.  This is a huge advantage for companies that implement agile practices well and will quickly become a disadvantage for companies that don't.

At OpenView Venture Partners, we have been pushing Agile and Scrum in particular for several years with great success and even recruited Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, to be a Senior Advisor to the firm, offer regular forums and workshops, and work with our portfolio companies.

While not very many companies have access to a mentor like Jeff Sutherland, there are a lot of great resources available to help you initiate or improve your agile practices. The newest one is VersionOne's new community site.  It is full of great ideas, training, and events that can help you.  Take a look and see what you think!

Stephen Jannise has an interesting analysis of the Oracle acquisition history and raises some interesting questions about where Oracle is heading with their acquisition strategy in his recent blog post.  He is also interested in hearing your predictions in his embedded survey.

If you are interested in selling your company to Oracle or to make a prediction on who Oracle is buying next, then take a look.

My wife is an artist going on 20 years now.  (You can see her art here.)  I have noticed over time that she gets inspired by new ideas, incorporates them into her art, eliminates the ideas that she doesn't like, and incorporates the ideas that she does like into her next pieces.  The ideas combine in interesting ways and help her to generate new ideas.  She also gets great inspiration and ideas from viewing other artists' work.  Sometimes she returns from a trip viewing great art incredibly frustrated with all of the new ideas that she wants to test in her artwork -- knowing that each idea is going to take a lot of work to try and figure out how to incorporate in a way that is her own. 

Over time, she incorporates a few of them in her art.  Some stick.  Others don't.  But she continues to push forward with a process of feeding new ideas into her art and using the results to generate new ideas.  Her process results in a new level of sophistication with each passing year.

As a venture capitalist, investing in expansion stage software/Internet companies over more than a decade, I see the same type of process going on industry-wide and in each of the companies that I have been involved with.  Ideas that are generated both internally and externally combine to form new and interesting software/Internet products and go-to-market strategies, and the companies and their products get more sophisticated with each passing year.

Matt Ridley nailed the process in his recent TED Talk on "When Ideas Have Sex."  Take a look at this video...




The best companies do a great job incorporating this process into their companies and networks.  Whether you are the leading innovator in your product market, a fast follower, or even just commoditizing your product market, you are utilizing these principals. 

If you want be one of the best companies, you need to master this process.  You need more sex!

Market Clarity is your top opportunity, whether you know it or not.  The better your market clarity, the greater your ability to cut through the noise and gain awareness, word of mouth, and, ultimately, more customers in your target market segment. 

Market Clarity is your number one business growth strategy.  It is that simple!

Why Your Market Clarity Sucks

Most companies have very low market clarity (take the assessment here) and every company can create better market clarity, so what stops them?  My experience leads me to four factors.  First, it is overwhelming to look at the list of items that you need to get right to achieve a really high level of market clarity.  Second, it takes some level of coordination across several departments to really nail your market clarity.  Third, when people start working on their market clarity, they feel overwhelmed and confused before they really tune into their target market segment and gain true clarity.  Finally, it takes discipline and tenacity, and a continuous improvement mindset to get true market clarity over time.  These four factors add up to many companies undergoing half-hearted and unsuccessful market clarity efforts.

How to Improve Your Market Clarity

How do you overcome the impediments to greater market clarity?  The answer is that this is a difficult goal to accomplish and you need a strong, long-term effort at the senior management level to make it happen.  There are four management practices that will significantly raise your probability of success: prioritization, collaboration, iteration, and rigorous quarterly reviews at the senior management level:

Prioritization- First, you MUST prioritize market clarity as an important goal to obtain at the senior management level.  Your could use the overall market clarity score as your S.M.A.R.T. goal, or you could choose one or more of the component parts that you believe are particularly good opportunities for improvement.

Collaboration- Second, you must assemble the right team to attack the issues and be accountable for the goal, particularly given that there are several functions that need to work well together if you are going to be successful.  My favored approach is to have a standing weekly market clarity agenda item in your "Market Touch Point Council*" (a group that helps drive whole product and go-to-market priorities that includes key representatives from product management, product development, marketing, sales, customer service, and professional services). The Market Touch Point Council is responsible for achieving the S.M.A.R.T. goal and works to understand the core issues and opportunities, to agree on the action steps that will help to achieve the goal, and to review the results and activities from progress to date.

Iteration- You will never, ever get complete market clarity, and you can only get part-way there on your first try (unless you are extremely lucky).  Market clarity is an iterative process, whereby each level you get to in each component of market clarity gives you insights into improving all of the other components.  Don't think in terms of reaching perfection with each iteration.  Think in terms of making measurable improvements to one or more components of market clarity and using those results to inform your next iteration.

Rigorous Reviews- Every quarter, the team working on Market Clarity needs to check its progress, reflect on the work and results to date, and determine what the best prioritized actions are to improve market clarity the following quarter.  This work then should be reviewed and discussed at the senior management level, and the final prioritized plans should be agreed to and committed on at the senior management level (along with updated S.M.A.R.T. Goals!).

Most Companies suck at market clarity, but you can improve!



*Some best practice companies have a Product Council and some have a Go-To-Market Council that helps to drive product and go-to-market strategy and execution decisions.  My view is that both of these are extremely valuable to making the right decisions and driving the organization's "touch points" with the market in an organized manner, but the groups also need to come together periodically and make sure that they stay aligned.  I am calling this the "Touch Point Council" in this post.

Four years ago I proposed a term for cloud-based services, XAAS (the "X" in XAAS essentially stands for anything), pronounces "Zass". (You can view it here and view a YouTube Video that I made for our first forum on the topic here).  My view at the time was that "Software" in software-as-a-service (SAAS) was too limiting as cloud-based services were evolving quickly, and possible services in the cloud are endless and could include a mix and match of the following:

• Hardware/Systems
• Operating Systems
• Virtualization (all aspects)
• Middleware
• Applications
• Integration software
• Development tools and platforms
• Administrative tools and platforms
• Technical operations services
• Data/information
• Other operation services (e.g., data entry, data QA, creative services)
• Business services
• Interfaces to the users (API/web services, Browser, Rich client interfaces, customer support interfaces such as chat, phone, e-mail, sms)

The overarching issue is that there are a lot of combinations and permutations of the above, and all seemingly good combinations will be tried and many will be successful.

Four years later, the term XAAS is starting to pick up some level of traction, as people try to create a term for each specific architectural offering. 

While I do not have great interest in what the term finally becomes, I do have great interest in the evolution of the XAAS architectural and business models.  My overarching sense is that the architectural models will eventually allow different layers of service offerings for people to tap into via browsers and other applications (From their desktops, laptops, mobile, and other devices) and for computers to tap into via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 

The interface to people/computers will encapsulate whatever service offering that has been decided to be useful for a specific market segment by an enterprising management team.

Fundamentally, the list of possible building blocks are like an erector set that could be combined in many ways.  The ultimate results, just like with any product offering, will depend on the target users that the product is aimed at and the needs/desires (active or latent) of the users.

What does this mean for the future of XAAS?  As with all products, it all starts with the target customer segment and the product follows. 

The future of XAAS?  It is going to go on and on...

Note: As a growth venture capital firm with significant amount of expansion capital to put to work, we are looking forward to the continued explosion of the XAAS ecosystem and are aggressively looking for new investments in XAAS related companies!

A fundamental principle associated with all business growth strategies is to deliver something that is differentiated and that as many customers as possible are willing to pay a reasonable price for.  Obvious, right?  

Then why do I keep hearing from people that are trying to conform to some kind of standard for packaging Software As a Service (SAAS)?  They include requirements like a lot of items like the pricing model, the contracting model, the lack of professional services in the whole product, the lack of a rich client interface, etc. etc.

The conversations are really troubling to me as many people in what is otherwise an extremely innovative industry are putting themselves into a (SAAS) box, rather than being innovative and working both inside and outside the box.

If you want to build the best, most differentiated and valuable whole product for your customers, don't be a SAAS militant.  Rather, determine your most attractive target market segment, figure out what you can do to address its goals in the best way possible, and build the best whole product that you can to serve that market.  Hopefully, your competitors will be SAAS militants and you will gain marketing share against them!

This might mean:

• You need to go without contracts (other than a EULA) or multi-year contracts even though you prefer annual contracts
• You can only bill them monthly or need to bill them for three years in advance even though you prefer annual pre-paid contracts
• You need to provide professional services (training, installation, creative, or other services) even though you would prefer self service
• You need to build a rich client for their desktop, laptop, and/or mobile devices even though you would prefer a pure browser-based architecture
• You need to offer your product on-premise for some of your customers or in the form of a software appliance even though you would prefer to run it in your data center (of course, the cloud may make this point go away)
• You need field-based sales even though you would prefer channel sales, inside sales or pure Internet sales.

Everyone has a favorite business model.  I do too.  The point is that it is not you or me that should decide, but rather the people that are paying for and using your whole product every day that WILL decide.  You can still have your ideal model and test out approaches that are more in keeping with your notion of the ideal model from your company's perspective.

As a firm that provides growth venture capital and significant business development services, we recommend this to all of our portfolio companies and enjoy competing against SAAS militants.  Get outside the box and don't be a SAAS Militant!

I was just catching up on my friend, Brad Feld's, blog and his post of this Michael Jordan Video caught my attention.

One of the points that I make over and over and over is that our culture is stuck with the notion that we must plan and then act and, if there is a failure, then it was either a failure in planning or execution.  Most situations and all new situations are unpredictable, so the best approach is to get to a quick implementation, identify the issues and opportunities, and then iterate again.  Follow this iterative approach a few times, and you will eventually find almost all the issues and be able to perform at the best level possible.  I call this success, but you could also call it failing multiple times.  Take a look at the video, it is short and to the point...




Expansion stage companies executing business growth strategies have initiatives that fall mostly into the "hard to predict" category, so try the iterative approach and try to fail more...then congratulate yourselves on your success in failing!

Is innovation exploding right now?  Are we entering a new phase of the Internet characterized by mobile, a shift toward collaboration, information consumption, and the golden age of advertising and commerce?  If you are a data junkie, or just want to step back and absorb some market data that will blow your mind, Mary Meeker's Internet presentation is a must read.

The data suggests that business growth strategies that are linked to mobile, advertising, commerce, and content management marketing could be the best ones going forward.  Also, generally moving more go-to-market focus and resources to the Internet makes a lot of sense (although somewhat obvious).  As an expansion stage venture capitalist focused on growth venture capital, I love the future that this data suggests!

InfoWorld  reported that Agile software development is now mainstream.  It is good to see that Agile is picking up steam as it is probably the single best set of principles and practices that a software company can incorporate to give the company an unfair competitive advantage at this point (at some point in the adoption curve companies that have not adopted it will be at a competitive disadvantage).

Our experience with Agile development started several years ago when we noticed that a few of our portfolio companies were starting to talk about it and incorporating Agile into their development practices.  We didn't know exactly what to think about it, but the reports coming from the portfolio companies were positive and it seemed like an area that we should know more about.

Three years ago, we invested in VersionOne, a company that has one of the most popular software/SAAS products on the market for supporting agile development teams (scrum boards or spreadsheets work great for small teams, but the more teams and the more distributed the teams, the more developers need a product like VersionOne).  One of the great things about our investment in VersionOne -- beyond the fact that they are a great success in the market -- is that their development team has nailed the principles and practices relating to agile (as well as many of the other newer software development practices). Also, the combination of learning from their team and having a software product that we can suggest to our other portfolio companies has made our global consulting services team, OpenView Labs, operate at a much higher level.

Three years ago we were also introduced to Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of Scrum (the most popular type of agile), which was a transformational event for OpenView (Jeff maintains a great blog on the topic, btw). 

My first introduction was over breakfast with Jeff.  I told him about our experiences and how I was impressed that one of our portfolio companies reported a 30% increase in productivity using agile.  I was proud to have "discovered" an approach that created a 30% productivity lift, but Jeff's response was: "Clearly they are doing it wrong.  They should be getting double or triple the productivity if they were doing it right."  As a venture capitalist that covets capital efficiency and takes great pride in offering strategic consulting services to our portfolio companies to help create unfair competitive advantages, that statement got me to straighten up and pay attention to the rest of the conversation! 

Very quickly after introducing Jeff to the OpenView team, we asked Jeff to become a Senior Advisor to OpenView and spend a week or so each month working with our portfolio companies, helping them to get to Agile best practices.

We also asked Jeff to lead a yearly Forum/Workshop for our portfolio companies and to do a scrum master training and certification program for our firm and portfolio companies (many visitors to our website probably scratch their heads when they see in the bios of many team members that we are certified scrum masters).

Coming out of the scrum master training session and our first Agile workshop we began to hear great feedback from several portfolio companies that they had started implementing some of the scrum practices and that they were getting some great results.  In addition, the OpenView team works on the constant issue of helping our expansion stage portfolio companies develop and grow and continues to work on ways that can add more value to our portfolio companies.

Over time, we have had additional agile development forums and workshops and Jeff has spent a lot of time working with and coaching our portfolio companies, which we recently released as a case study.

We have also spent a great deal of time working agile principles and practices into more traditional management practices and developed the first cut of an Agile Company Development methodology. We use this to run our firm and have also trained and coached our portfolio companies on this methodology at several forums and workshops. We recently released this as a case study as well.  The companies that have adopted it have found that it takes some work to initiate the methodology, but that once it is in the rhythm of the company it really helps to propel the company development forward, which is extremely important for expansion stage companies (The results include better companies, higher quality and more consistent results, and happier teams).

To date, our experiences with Agile have been remarkable.  We continue to develop our techniques and network to help our portfolio companies more and we have some plans to get our Agile Company Development Methodology to the next level and make it more accessible by our expansion stage technology community later this year.

I will be posting more on these topics. We will also have a weekly tips-and-tricks e-mail that is meant to identify the best ideas for helping expansion stage companies each week and point to those resources where we will have ongoing ideas and updates.  Subscribe here.

One of our ongoing heuristics for building expansion stage technology companies has been content marketing management programs and social media campaigns.  I continue to be amazed at the number of ways marketers can drive sales leads without advertising.

Here is another great example of a straightforward marketing approach for building sales leads which combines the basic principles of content management marketing with social media.  The result was 100 sales leads in 30 days, but the campaign will continue offering sales leads for a long time to come.

Brian Klais has a great post on Google's new time dimension.  If you haven't searched Google recently, try it now and you will see the new search options column in your search results screen.  One of the search options is to search for the freshest content, which clearly gives different results with each search period chosen.

What does this mean for the Internet marketers executing business growth strategies?  If the search behavior adapts to this new feature, it means that you have a great new opportunity to win in organic search results by creating fresh content with your keywords more regularly (like every 24 hours!).

The easiest way to have daily fresh content is via blogging and social media, and the companies with more sophisticated content management marketing programs will also be able to take advantage of this shift.

I also expect that this shift will put more pressure on companies to more completely develop their corporate blogging and corporate social media practices to take advantage of the power of more employees participating online everyday. They will also be able to take advantage of re-purposing content on additional sites to increase the number of days that a given piece of content remains fresh.

As a venture capital firm specializing in helping to build expansion stage companies, we are pretty excited about the new marketing opportunities that the Google time dimension offers. The time dimension and the other new options are going to create an entirely new set of opportunities for our growing companies to be found via Google!

Google's Time Dimension- it will Accelerate Corporate Social Media!

John Wooden died yesterday at 99 years old.  The IndyStar, among many publications, has a well done overview of his life.

In my mind, the most amazing thing about the man was not just his unbelievable winning record as a basketball coach. More importantly, he determined the aspirations and goals that he was attempting to accomplish and then spent his career developing, refining, and teaching a methodology that:

• He would be able to live by and was teachable to others,
• Focused on the things that are controllable, and
• Resulted in a very consistent achievement of exceptional results over a long period of time.

John Wooden's way is both unique and relatively public (both the methodology and the great results), so it is an excellent example to study and understand if you want to put some time into grasping the approaches of great leaders.

A nice video tribute to the man:




John Wooden, in his own words:





There are a lot of good books on John Wooden and his methodologies.  A really great resources is the official John Wooden website, which has a tremendous amount of material on his results and his methodologies, including his famous Pyramid of Success.



The great thing about John Wooden was not his winning record on the basketball court, but rather The John Wooden Way of being a lifelong Passionate and Disciplined Teacher.

If you are a student of leadership, building great people and management teams, I highly recommend learning more about the John Wooden Way.

We spend a tremendous amount of time helping our expansion stage portfolio companies develop their organizational rhythm (Annual, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily iterative cycles) and execute their business growth strategies. 

One of my observations over time is that there are many different leadership and management approaches that work well for developing and improving the organizational rhythm.  The observation being that there is no single "right" style of leadership, but rather that there are many that work well.

I came across this Ted talk about 6 great leaders of organizational rhythm that get their orchestras to perfect harmony without saying a word.

Take a look and imagine how great it would be to have your management team working at this level of harmony...

Business growth strategies need iterative approaches to be successful.  I have been pushing iterative approaches to execution for years and more recently have been working to develop practices that our expansion stage portfolio companies can easily adopt that help them with iterative management practices.

One of the issues with people grasping the idea that iterative approaches work best seems to be that most people are educated to believe that they can perfectly plan then perfectly execute.  With this mental model, it is extremely difficult to get the idea of iterative approaches to stick.  Perhaps this quick Ted Video from Tom Wujec will help.   He summarizes his marshmallow experiments and shows how kindergartners beat MBAs because of their iterative approaches...take a look!

Implementing a business growth strategy?  The standard approach is to expect that you can plan perfectly, then execute perfectly, then move onto something new.  Plan, execute, done. 

Unfortunately, the world does not work in a perfectly predictable manner, particularly with strategies that are new and the mental model of "plan, execute, done" leads operators more toward thinking that they did something wrong when the world turns out to be messier than this model suggests.  This, in turn, leads many operators to ignore or not seek out issues and improvement opportunities, thinking that they either made a mistake in the planning, the execution of the plan, or both.  This is just the opposite of what you want if you really want to execute effective business growth strategies.

The agile approach and mindset to business growth strategies eliminates these problems. By agile, I mean:

1. develop a long term goal for the strategy (the more S.M.A.R.T. the better),

2. carve off the first iteration of the execution,

3. plan the first iteration out,

4. execute the first iteration,

5. then check the results vs. the goals for the first iteration, reflect on the results and approaches, and identify the issues and opportunities going forward.

At this point, you are in a good position to review the progress, issues, and opportunities against the original goals, and carve off the next iteration (and so on). 

This approach to business growth strategies not only fits the messy world of executing business growth strategies well, but also sets the right mindset in the team.  The team goes into the business growth strategy assuming that they are NOT going to get it exactly right, puts in a step (#5) that proactively asks the team to figure out the issues and improvements, and gives the team multiple iterations to improve the strategy before moving its attention onto another topic.

Want to execute a great business growth strategy?  The agile approach works best!

Business growth strategies work best when you are constantly seeking out issues during execution and addressing those issues head on.  The most important part of successful execution in my view is to periodically reflect (via a retrospective or after action review) to identify as many important issues as you can (that you are having with each iteration of the execution of the business growth strategy).  If you are an expansion stage company and don't have a long list of big issues, you are either not executing aggressively enough or you are not working hard enough to seek out your issues and highlight them. 

It is exceptionally important to have your issues identified, as each issue is an opportunity to get better and the bigger issues are opportunities to get much better!

I just got back from a board meeting with one of my favorite management teams who practice this approach exceptionally well in their quarterly operating reviews and board meetings.  If the average operator sat in the meetings, they would probably think that this company had serious problems because of all the issues that were discussed.  My reaction is just the opposite.  I know that every company has issues (by my definition, executing business growth strategies CREATES issues), but this company is particularly good at seeking out their issues and, equally important, addressing them.

The great thing about the meetings is that we can spend the time discussing ideas and approaches that address the most important business issues rather than help the team identify their issues.  This gives the management team the opportunity to get ideas from other members of their senior team and also get advice, ideas, and contacts from the board members and outside observers who may have experience addressing these types of issues (or know people who can help, or can help craft approaches that can help).

The more issues that you address, the better you become, and this company is becoming great at a rapid rate because of their approach to seeking out and addressing issues.

Issues are opportunities...reward the people who find and highlight them!