Faster Growth Comes From 5 Dimensions - By Dr. Peter Cohan at Babson College

The excerpts are taken from Five Commandments for Faster Growth by Peter Cohan, Lecturer with Babson College published at Knowledge at Wharton (A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania). 

Companies can find growth along five dimensions, ranging from the most basic to the most challenging. These dimensions can either be the same as those in a company’s existing practices, or reflect new and different parameters.

1. Customers,
2. Geographies,
3. Products,
4. Capabilities, and/or
5. Culture.

1. Find growth from current or new customers

1. Segment your current customers.
2. Identify how much of your revenue comes from each segment.
3. Analyze the broad trends – such as evolving customer needs, changing economic conditions, or new technology – that might boost (or contract) growth in these segments.
4. Estimate your company’s share of the most important segments.
5. For saturated segments, identify new segments that would be interested in buying your product and interview potential customers in those segments to gauge their level of interest.
6. For unsaturated segments, determine the most effective marketing strategies for achieving further penetration.
7. Assess the cost, the fit with your company’s skills, and the time-to-market of the options.
8. Pick the option with the lowest cost, best fit and quickest time-to-market.

2. Expand into new countries

1. List four countries that best match your current markets.
2. Identify how your product can boost the profits of your distribution partners in those countries.
3. Ask potential end-users of your product to rank the criteria — e.g., price, quality, or service — they use to compare suppliers.
4. Analyze how well your company does on these criteria relative to competitors.
5. Position your product to outperform competitors on the ranked criteria.

3. Grow by selling new products

1. Ask your customers to tell you their goals and the biggest barriers to achieving them.
2. Brainstorm new product ideas that would help your customers leap over these barriers.
3. Build a prototype of the best ideas and get customer feedback.
4. Turn the most promising ideas into your next product.

4. Add capabilities to attack new growth opportunities

1. List the skills needed to succeed in the new market.
2. Assess the fit between those skills and the ones at which your firm currently excels.
3. Develop a plan to hire or partner to get the skills you’ll need.
4. Manage the process of changing your company’s skills.

5. Create a growth culture

1. Make a list of your values — one of which should be customer innovation.
2. Use a hiring process that favors people who share those values.
3. Give employees time to brainstorm new products that will make customers better off.
4. Provide resources to commercialize the best products and reward those who succeed — as well as the noble failures.

To follow these commandments, assemble a team whose members excel in the skills you’ll need to conceive, evaluate, choose and implement a growth strategy.

Hire an independent outsider to help structure your analysis and to battle confirmation bias – the tendency to embrace data that reinforce your existing beliefs.

Follow these five commandments and your company’s growth will accelerate.

As said by Ram Charan, it's possible for high potential leaders to expand extremely fast; every time the high growth companies had an expansion expansion burst, the complexity of the leader's job increased;

1. more employees to organize
2. new government bodies to contend with
3. more foreign cultures to understand
4. more consumers to please
5. all against a backdrop of ever-changing technology and competition. 

Note

1. All the content here belongs to Lecturer Peter Cohan . Complied here for reference purposes only as the contents are very informative.