Consider the very different sorts of challenges facing Citigroup, one of the world’s biggest financial institutions. In December 2007, Vikram Pandit took over as CEO after Citi reported surprisingly disappointing third-quarter earnings (Pandit stepped down as CEO in October 2012). Of course, disappointing earnings were an early sign of the financial crisis that hit the global economy with full force in 2008. One of Pandit’s first actions was to commission an in-depth look at Citi’s current situation, strengths, and gaps. One finding was that innovation was no longer viewed as a core competency. While Citi had been responsible for many “firsts” during its history, including creating the first global foreign exchange network and connecting the world by financing initiatives such as the transatlantic cable and the Panama Canal, the assessment found that the innovation pipeline had dried up and that the culture had shifted away from manifesting innovation as a core value. Don Callahan, Citi’s chief administrative officer, told Pandit, “It’s worse than we thought. We’ve lost innovation.” Pandit’s response was direct: “Get it back.” Pandit believed that for Citi to not only survive but thrive, it had to urgently reestablish innovation—and the growth that innovation creates—as a central focus.
Citi is earlier in its journey to systematize the pursuit of innovation-driven growth than P&G, but despite the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the company had enough core strength to reboot, refocus, and reenergize its pursuit of growth, and since then has made substantial progress toward revving up its own growth engine. Notably, the appointment of a chief innovation officer and the creation of a new team, Citi Ventures, which operates in close partnership with some of Citi’s most innovative business units and leaders, have had real business impact and created an innovation system that Citi has begun to scale across the enterprise.
While P&G and Citi are both giant companies that we have worked with closely (Anthony was the coauthor of the P&G article mentioned earlier), many of the lessons apply to smaller companies as well. Building a Growth Factory also includes a handful of illustrative examples extracted from our firsthand experience at Innosight, an eighty-person professional services firm where we both serve as members of the global leadership team.
Whether you are the CEO of a multinational, multibillion-dollar company or the head of a three-person enterprise, we hope detailing the components of a functioning growth factory will help you to achieve the results you seek.
1. “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/special-features/innovative-companies-list.html, accessed September 17, 2012.
Component 1: The Growth Blueprint
| Growthblueprint |
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IN LEWIS CARROLL’S classic Alice in Wonderland, a lost Alice seeks guidance from the Cheshire Cat.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” she asks.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” the Cat responds.
“I don’t much care where—” Alice says.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” the Cat concludes.
As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
A clear growth blueprint is an important first step in the transformation from treating growth as a gamble to approaching it in a more disciplined way. An ideal growth blueprint has two primary elements:
1 Growth types that clearly define the types of growth strategies the company will pursue
2 Growth goals and guidelines with specific, shared targets and clear definitions of tactics that are on and off the table
Table 2, which is extracted from the full growth factory assessment, shows how to get a quick view of your performance in this component.
TABLE 2
| Element | Requires attention | On the way | Desired state |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth types | No definition of growth types | Defined growth types, at least one of which is noncore; nonspecific classification criterion | Defined growth types with simple, agreed-upon classification criteria |
| Growth goals and guidelines | No clear vision | Directional vision lacking key specifics | Codified and shared growth targets with detailed on- and off-the-table strategic options |
1a. Growth Types
Clear Definitions of the Types of Growth Strategies the Company Will Pursue
Before a company constructs a factory to manufacture a product, it must decide what specifically it wants to produce. The same holds for a growth factory: before constructing one, a company must define clearly the different types of growth it ought to produce. This clarification is important because, as discussed in other sections of this e-book, sustainable growth through innovation requires a company to pursue multiple types of growth at the same time. The company needs to measure, manage, and staff these different types in different ways. A lack of clearly defined growth types almost always suboptimizes one type of idea to the detriment of the whole enterprise.
A theme that we will repeat throughout is that there isn’t one perfect way to categorize different types of growth pursuits. For example, P&G has identified four distinct growth types:
1 Commercial—efforts to increase trial and usage of existing products without changing the product itself. P&G’s innovative Old Spice marketing campaign involving actor Isaiah Mustafa that generated close to 2 billion public relations impressions and propelled the deodorant into category leadership in 2010 was a powerful commercial innovation.
2 Sustaining—the “er” innovations that take existing solutions and make them better, faster, cheaper, and so on. Sustaining innovations like new scents or formulations for different washing machines helped the Tide brand grow significantly even in mature markets over the past decade.
3 Transformational—step-changes whose dramatic improvements reframe a category. An example of this form of innovation is Crest 3D White, a line of advanced oral care products, including one that whitens teeth in two hours.
4 Disruptive—new brands or business models that win through