Chasing Growth or Executing Your Strategy?

According to The Conference Board 2011 CEO Report, the primary challenge facing CEOs is growth.  Not profit, not customer retention or expansion, not innovation, but growth!  This doesn’t make any sense.

**At the bottom of this post, you can link to our 4-part How to Execute Strategy series**

Growth is what is known as a lagging indicator.  In other words, lots of things cause growth to happen or not to happen, but you can’t just make growth happen!  For instance, an innovative new product, new customers or more purchases from current customers would all drive growth, but you can’t do anything about growth without these other things happening.  Growth is not what you should be tracking and growth should not be your goal.  Growth is the consequence of executing your strategy every day!

It’s like trying to lose weight.  You want to lose pounds and you know you can’t “manage what you don’t measure” so you do the right thing and go buy a scale.  Every morning you measure your weight diligently with hopes of moving that needle (or most likely digital readout) just a bit, but nothing happens!  But why?  I’m measuring; therefore I think I’m managing.  Why am I not losing weight?  You are not losing weight because you are measuring the wrong thing!  What you must measure to lose weight is how many calories you burn in a day via a complicated thing called your basal metabolic rate plus the calories you burn doing any additional exercise versus the number of calories you intake.  Make your caloric intake 3,500 calories less than what you burned and, congratulations, you lose one pound!  Measure your weight all you want.  You’ll most likely never lose any pounds until you start measuring and managing the right things.

Just like trying to lose weight, the reason we are caught off guard by our growth or lack thereof is because we are measuring the wrong things.  It is understandable that we do.  Growth or increase in top line revenue is very easy to measure.  It’s staring at you each month right there on the top of your financials!  Measuring the things that lead to the growth you desire is much more difficult, but it must be done.

So, if growth is one of your goals this year like it is for so many other leaders, take the time to determine what factors drive your growth.  Measure them and manage them and you are much more likely to get the growth you are after!  I heard it said one time by a very wise CEO, “Don’t focus on getting bigger, focus on getting better.  If you get better, your clients will force you to get bigger!”

Want to learn more about How to Execute Your Strategy? Click here to access our 4-part series on Executing Strategy. 

Pretty good advice.

Image courtesy of pixabay.

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