Devising an adaptive strategy

One thing every company wants is consistent growth, which in most cases is a steady increase in revenue streams. But what most fail to imbibe is, maintaining a steady growth is not sufficient to sustain oneself in the bigger scheme of things.

If we take a walk down memory lane, over the past 30 years, half of the top 100 stocks listed on the New York stock exchange no longer exist, a statistic quoted by McKinsey. These companies were all showing steady growth and consistent returns to shareholders, while only the companies with exponential growth survived.

Growing customer expectations, increase in competition and volatile/ aggressively changing market landscape have made achieving growth an uphill battle. While all these factors are dynamic in nature, smart leadership and quick decision making can give an edge over the situation.

Additionally, there are aspects like digital influence on markets and technological disruptions that can completely blindside a company or even an entire vertical in the market. This has transformed the linear process of achieving growth into a much more complex activity requiring a lot of research, strategy, and flexibility.

Organizations need to have a clearly thought-out plan, surgical implementation, and contingency plans in place to tackle technological disruptions. Management has to get to a hyper granular level to create a plan of action to recognize growth patterns and capitalize on them; which means up-to-date market research and subject matter expertise both blended together with technology.

Furthermore, this necessitates copious amounts of discipline, extensibility and a sense of urgency from the leadership to formulate strategies that lead to amplified growth.

Leadership can develop a successful game plan by addressing three main avenues, namely

• Growth center
  Identifying or finding sustainable revenue streams for the longer term.
• Consistent growth
  Securing existing revenue streams and generating new ones.
• Growth Engine
  Establishing a robust system that amplifies output over time.

Successful leaders, poised to driving growth, have formed a blueprint around the above avenues. Fruitful growth plans should also factor-in implementation which requires the team to be deliberate, disciplined and persistent in their approach.

The next blog will elaborate further on the three avenues and how to tackle them to build a powerful strategy that boosts an organization’s growth, classifying them as an outperformer in their segment. These blogs are inspired by several articles published in the McKinsey Insights and personal experience from working with both Enterprise and Startups.

Written by
Srikar Perala
Associate Consultant