We've been talking about growth and
how growth relates to strategy, and we've also been talking more specifically
about growing through scaling your existing business operations.
So we've covered a lot of ground,
let's revisit what some of the key ideas are from this discussion.
First of all, growth,
if it's to be strategic, needs to be intentional and proactive.
It can't just be a knee jerk reaction to external pressures.
Those pressures exist, but I have encouraged you to think more carefully
about how to grow in a way that's intentional and
not just as a reaction to external pressures to grow.
Second of all, strategic growth needs to advance your mission or
purpose as an organization.
In other words,
you need to really understand why it is you are attempting to grow.
Now, once you've satisfied those two criteria as it were,
there are of course several ways to grow.
You can grow through scaling your existing business operations.
You can grow through market entry.
You can grow through acquisition.
You can grow through organic innovation.
There's a number of ways to grow, but
those are all different ways to think about, there's pros and cons of each.
Effective growth strategies also have clarity
about how growth will create value.
So, consistent with the first couple of points,
it's important to understand how growth will help you better achieve, create,
develop, defend a valuable competitive position in the market segment or
industry you're operating in.
There's some other lessons.
First of all, growth strategies are risky, many things can go wrong here.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about what some of the risks are to growth.
You can make mistakes like over stretching,
you can grow too fast, you can grow too slow.
There's other risks that include things like growing your top line instead of your
bottom line, you can simply grow in the wrong direction.
So there's lots of things that can trip you up as your organization
attempts to grow.
But smart growth essentially utilizes two key ideas.
You've got to identify the right opportunity,
and then you've got to formulate a careful, robust strategy.
And we've talked about some tools, and frameworks,
that can help you do that, including scenario planning.
So I hope that this has been an interesting and
informative time we've spent together, talking about growth and
specifically talking about growth through scaling.