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Four Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your Business

“Things are either growing or dying” is a famous quip. While it’s unclear who said it first, it’s been used regularly at business conferences to fire up audiences over the last few decades. The speaker often follows it up with a list of suggestions like “five tips to start scaling your sales”. However, it turns out one of the most dangerous things you can do is to prematurely start to focus on scaling.

This may seem like an odd statement coming from a entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and professor who has spent the last few years in my role at Carnegie Mellon studying scaling startups and teaching a popular graduate course titled The Science of Growth that was recently turned in as a book.

I’m a big fan of scaling up innovative ideas and making sure they have as much impact as possible. In our research, to try and understand the critical success factors of scaling a startup, we followed the journeys of 10 well-known companies, ranging from modern marvels like Tesla, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn all the way back to the retail juggernaut McDonalds – and then contrasts each story with that of a lesser-known startup that was created at about the same time, with a similar product, targeting the same market.

From these cases, we came to appreciate that there were a set of four what we call ‘prerequisites’ that startups needed to focus on BEFORE growth. Just as you can’t take calculus before basic arithmetic, these are the essential foundational elements of any startup before the entrepreneurs turn their attention to growth.


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About the Author

Sean AmmiratiSean Ammirati is a partner at Birchmere Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Pittsburgh, PA, and Palo Alto, CA, and is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, he was the COO of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most influential sites about the future of technology and innovation. Sean was previously co-founder and CEO of mSpoke, a big data SaaS company that was the first acquisition of LinkedIn.

Value of Evaluating Business Operational Performance

Does your organization need to improve its performance to remain competitive? Do you have a process to continuously identify the most value-adding improvement initiatives that will keep you ahead of the competition at a cost you can afford?
 

A lot of business leaders recognize a need to continuously improve their organization’s performance but either haven’t established a formal program to do so on an ongoing basis or worse yet, just don’t know how.

At StrategyDriven our experience working with leading companies around the world reveals that a formally defined, well-funded, and effectively executed business performance assessment program is the centerpiece for continuous performance improvement. Through this program, the business leaders we work with have enhanced productivity, reduced costs, and raised revenues by double and triple digit percentages.

Our Value of Evaluating Business Operational Performance video describes how to calculate the financial benefit of having a business performance assessment program that enables you to identify the actions needed to make your organization’s performance rise above the rest.

Business Performance Assessment Programs play a key role in the identification of value-adding performance improvement opportunities that will keep your company on top. If you don’t have such a program or are looking for ways to improve the value of your business performance assessments, register for StrategyDriven’ FREE Maximizing the Value of Business Performance Assessments video series. In this free, five part video tutorial, we’ll show you how to optimally synthesize your organization’s data into actionable performance improvement information.


About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Women and the economy: an opportunity for growth

One of the most strategic challenges remains inexplicably a black hole. It is time to unveil some figures and share thoughts on this hidden treasure: women.

As Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund states: if women were employed at the same rate as men, GDP would increase by 5 percent in the United States, by 9 percent in Japan and by 27 percent in India.

Gender inequality is a reality


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About the Author

Martine LiautaudMartine Liautaud is the author of Breaking Through: Stories and Best Practices From Companies That Help Women Succeed (Wiley, April 2016). Martine is also founder the Women Initiative Foundation (WIF), in coordination with global energy player and expert operator ENGIE. WIF seeks to improve the place of women in business and increase their presence in universities around the world through active mentorship, sponsorship support and training programs.

StrategyDriven Enterprises Launches an Online Talent Management Program Forum

StrategyDriven Enterprises launched an online talent management program forum; providing leaders access to decades of first-hand experience in programmatically acquiring, developing, and retaining high-quality employees.
 
StrategyDriven Talent Management ForumStrategyDriven Enterprises, LLC announced the launch of an online Talent Management Forum; providing innovative thought leadership and collaboration opportunities to help executives and managers programmatically drive the acquisition, development, and retention of high-quality employees.

“When highly skilled and knowledgeable people give the full measure of their creativity, intellect, and effort to achieving the organization’s goals, truly remarkable performance results,” explains Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Thus, talented personnel are the lifeblood of every organization.”

“Implementing StrategyDriven’s recommended talent management practices can help enhance any organization’s ability to attract, develop, and retain top talent,” says Karen Juliano, StrategyDriven’s Editor-in-Chief. “This is achieved through deliberate actions that make employees feel valued and respected, inspired and motivated while at the same time being managed effectively and efficiently.”

Contributed to, by highly experienced business leaders, StrategyDriven’s online Talent Management Forum provides actionable methods and tools executives and managers can use to implement and enhance key components of their talent management program including:

  • Talent Acquisition – identification of near and long-term personnel knowledge, skills, and experiences needed combined with the effective search, vetting, and signing-on of employees whose backgrounds meet these needs
  • Talent Development – enhancement of employee knowledge, skills, and experiences so to prepare a sufficient number of individuals to meet the organization’s near and long-term talent needs as circumstances dictate
  • Talent Retention – creation of a workplace environment that attracts and retains the highly talented individuals needed for the organization’s success while concurrently ensuring the departure of those personnel not contributing sufficient value to the organization

The StrategyDriven Talent Management Forum’s thought leadership documents are being distributed to StrategyDriven’s clients, including some of the world’s most respected companies. These documents are available at: www.StrategyDriven.com/talent-management.

Procedure Development Best Practice 1 – Integrated Development

StrategyDriven Procedure Development Best Practice ArticleThe complexity of modern organizations necessitates a collage of policies, processes, and procedures to guide their operations. Some procedures guide the actions of personnel within a single workgroup while others govern interactions and handoffs between workgroups.
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