GROWTH OUTLIERS
Every company strives for steady and predictable growth. Investors lean toward startups that have a promise of scalability and return on investment. At the Business Outliers, we come in to help you drive innovation in your organization using growth approach that define success. We know that being too close to your business, it becomes difficult to see the right decision making step to take. We help you take a step back to see the bigger picture in our business.
A research was conducted by Havard Business Review to find out how difficult it is to achieve steady and continuous growth. Company performance was studied from diverse sectors, and the results were surprising. Only about 380 companies from the total of 4,793 companies researched grew by 5% of their market capitalization year on year , and only 4% achieved a net income growth of at least 5% in each of the five years. This study was done in a 5 year and 10 year period, and the results were the similar.
We could easily say that luck may play a role in achieving this steady 10-year growth by these companies, but it is more likely that the outliers —who defied the odds by achieving steady growth for 10 years running— have interesting traits in common, some predictable and some surprising.
Here are some of key traits that were discovered;
- The growth outliers do a tremendous amount of experimentation and innovation. They develop and deploy new technologies, move into new markets, explore new business models, and even open up new industries. They take on acquisitions and aggressively seek input from people and organizations unlike their own.
- They build innovation into everyday operations. At many traditional companies, the most powerful people run the large, well-established lines of business, and growth-oriented innovation is managed by a separate, less powerful group. Innovation at the outliers tends to be better integrated. It is mentioned prominently in recruitment materials, marketing messages, and employee communications. It is also built into the company’s resource allocation and promotion processes.
- They hold on to their talent: One of the implications of executing transformations without wrenching change is that talented employees are less likely to have their careers cut short unnecessarily. Like Cognizant, the other outliers are slow to downsize, and their habit of gradually moving resources into new businesses means that emerging leaders have new places to go
- They rapidly adjust and readjust resources and are comfortable moving executives and employees from one role to the other.
- Outliers favour adaptability over pure efficiency, even though it occasionally leads to less than perfect outcomes.
- They avoid dramatic divestitures.
- They don’t change high-level strategies quickly, and they keep their senior leadership stable.
Looking at these traits, it is obvious that emerging business have a lot to learn from these outliers. Stability and transparent cultural values which will help employees feel confident about taking initiatives and allow business to innovate and achieve as well as maintain steady growth.
At the Business Outliers we come in to help you drive innovation in your organization using growth approach that define success. We identify areas where technology will work to improve your performance.