Ask these 14 questions to jump-start your company’s growth
Original Publish Date: Nov 29, 2020
What will the global economy look like in 2021?
Any economic growth next year depends on (1) the magnitude and duration of new COVID-19 outbreaks, (2) effectiveness, maintenance, or reinforcements of social distancing measures, (3) time to treatment or vaccine, (4) extent of significant fiscal or monetary policies. A picture of unpredictability.
The general feeling of fighting for survival will not go away for many companies. The idea of “more with less” won’t go away for many industries outside a lucky few.
Situations like these call for ingenuity. A sense of resourcefulness to uncover small wins across the entire organization that cumulatively leaves a big impact.
I’d like to share a cross-functional growth exercise you can try within your organization to supercharge your business even in gloomy times. The insights from this exercise can make your organization much more resourceful and nimbler to take control of the eventual good times.
But first, I must introduce you to my idea of “business levers”.
Business Levers
You can study any market by compiling individual choices made by every company in that market. The choices that any company makes broadly drive production, selling, and support functions.
Shown below is a (fairly) exhaustive set of choices any company must make to participate and compete in a marketplace. Again, these choices might be easy to understand in certain industries versus others. In either case, a version of these choices applies to every company.
These choices are what I call “business levers”. The decisions that a company makes on how to “operate” each business lever show the tradeoffs it makes to exist and add value in any market.
You can even speculate on the gradual evolution of any market – think short, medium, long-term trends – by identifying the different market players and summing up their choices on every “business lever”.
Growth Exercise
Let’s focus on the actual exercise now that you’re familiar with business levers.
My inspiration for this section came from a self-reflection exercise for individuals shared by Neville Medhora. Every business also needs to get introspective at some point.
For this exercise to work well – I suggest you pull together a cross-functional team of any manageable size. I’ll leave it up to you to decide on the exact number. Take a printout of the business levers or have it on a screen so that your team can use it as a checklist.
Following is the list of 14 questions you want to ask as a team to jump-start growth within your company. It’s important to ask these questions for each business lever.
#1 - What were the most valuable wins per business lever over the last year? How can we 10X them?
#2 - What’s an offbeat/unconventional way to operate each business lever?
#3 - What’s the simplest way to operate each business lever?
#4 - What’s the most time-efficient way to operate each business lever?
#5 - Which competencies per business lever are most valuable to the customer? How can we amplify them?
#6 - What immediate improvements can we make to each business lever without corporate reviews?
#7 - What can we adopt from other companies, industries, sectors for each business lever?
#8 - What choices per business lever would we make if we were about to go out of business?
#9 - Which 20% of efforts generate 80% of benefits in each business lever? How can we do more of that?
#10 - What are our major assumptions to operate each business lever? What do the wrong ones tell us?
#11 - What choice/investment should we make now per business lever to be thankful for in the future?
#12 - What are the most valuable activities in each business lever? How can we do more of that?
#13 - What are we giving up by sticking to the status quo on operating each business lever?
#14 - What can we do differently to break from the accepted standard practices in each business lever?
There are other ways to engage in this exercise.
You can take these questions and every business lever and set them up as a table on an excel sheet for your team members to reflect individually at their own pace. You can also build a survey with these questions and business levers to accumulate results across a much wider base of cross-functional team members. One other option would be to use your internal crowdsourcing system (if you have one) to start a campaign with these growth questions and business levers for your entire organization.
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely.” – Mark Twain
Give this exercise your best shot. Come back to it periodically – quarterly, bi-annually, or annually – to analyze your business levers in a novel way. This growth exercise is a “mental kaleidoscope” to uncover curious combinations that can drive your business to improvise and uncover gems for growth no matter the economic environment.