We sometimes refer to the “designated doubters” in corporations, and these are often people in finance. They have a responsibility to make very sure that corporate and stockholders’ money is spent well; the idea is that “before we make any investment we want you to prove to us holistically and analytically that it’s a good investment.” And that makes a lot of sense at one level, but when you’re entering areas of uncertainty, the data you’ve got to work with is not very good. You’re extrapolating from the past into a new kind of future.
And so we find the phenomenon of growth gridlock; the growth leader locks heads with the designated doubters and gets caught up in a process which is mostly about making presentations to boardrooms and trying to convince the finance people with what everybody acknowledges is not very good data. Some growth leaders don’t even try to do that; they find a very low-cost experiment that they can conduct without going through the traditional processes, and then when they’ve gotten some real data to demonstrate that the idea can succeed, they go back and ask for money to ramp it up.
Author: Jeanne Liedtka
Source: Business Finance Magazine
Subjects: Finance, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior
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