Step 1: Kill the zombies
Our current business culture sure does glamorize entrepreneurship, scaling and growth. The desire for growth is the trigger that sparks most CEOs and owners to reach out to me for strategy or innovation advice.
I believe the current “scale or fail” mindset can actually harm some businesses and the people who work for them. I confess that I have an old-school bias toward the tortoise over the hare. The ant over the grasshopper. Some of my favorite business books are “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” (looking at you, Jim Collins). I try to avoid books with “unicorn” in the title.
In my tour of duty with Warner Media and Spanx, my role was to plan for growth. I take a “go slow to grow” approach and begin the planning process with two steps:
Step 1: Kill the zombies
When planning for growth, deciding what you’ll stop is as important as deciding what you’ll start. Killing projects that drain cash and bandwidth will free up resources to invest in new ideas.
To whoever coined the phrase “zombie project,” I thank you. For each of us, these two words quickly spark a memory of projects that lingered long past their expiration date. According to Scott D. Anthony, David S. Duncan, and Pontus M.A. Siren, “ Zombies are projects that, for any number of reasons, fail to fulfill their promise and yet keep shuffling along, sucking up resources without any real hope of having a meaningful impact on the company’s strategy or revenue prospects.” Anthony, Duncan and Siren underscore killing zombies as an essential step to innovation and growth in “Zombie Projects: How to Find Them and Kill Them.”
Are you willing to self fund?
One of the most notable projects in my career was working with the team that set out to create a new Hollywood studio for TNT. The strategy would allow us to be the master of our fate and relieve TNT from the risk of acquiring other studios' content.
The team pitched the idea to our board to request a substantial investment. The board responded with, “great idea!… can you self fund it?” Over the following six months the team hunted and killed all the zombies to fund what we deeply believed was the right bet for the future of our business.
Killing zombies is a clever turn of phrase that encourages reexamining your choices and tradeoffs. A way of asking which bets do we want to place today?
Step 2: Compare and place your bets
Your next step: gather your team and gather your options. With Zombie projects out of the picture, it’s time to assess the rest of the portfolio. Clients often ask, what about our core business? Yes! All of it. From current products to new opportunities.
Growth pipelines are made up of all the things: new products, brand extensions, new market entry, pricing strategies, partnerships - anything that drives growth - including your core business.
Compared to what?
When someone pitches what they are convinced is a great new business idea, the first question that comes to my mind is, “compared to what”?
Two useful tools for comparing and choosing ideas:
The filter is a short list of criteria used to rank and choose which ideas to pursue. My filters included items like scalability, growth, addressable market, ease of execution. Choose a handful of health indicators, score your growth ideas and see what rises above.
The impact effort matrix is a super simple 2 x 2 you can use with your team to debate and sort growth options. I talked about it in this blog post.
Both approaches help temper the emotion and posturing that naturally come part and parcel with new product pitches.
In it together
I am a steadfast advocate for working on growth and investment exploration with a diverse team of decision makers. If new products and services are to be relevant to future customers, including these perspectives at the front end of innovation is an imperative for success. Inclusive teams really do make better decisions. In a 2017 article for Forbes, Erik Larson, founder of Cloverpop, shares compelling findings from his study of inclusive teams.
Inclusive teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time.
“Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions two times faster with half the meetings.”
You had me at “half of the meetings.” If you’re planning the future, include future customers. I include a cross slice of people from the organization that represent the world in which we live. The most effective innovation groups represent a range of roles, levels and perspectives. We can all recall a time when we heard a new idea and “just didn’t get it” at the onset. One noteworthy example for me is Twitch. I became aware of Twitch in 2011 and thought, why? Today gaming is a spectator sport in my house and Twitch is a big part of it.
Your growth plans shouldn’t be left to chance. Healthy teams deliberately plan for growth by making time and space throughout the year. As you begin, first carefully hunt for zombies to free up resources and be sure to include your future customers in investment decisions.