Long-term profitable growth

Growth mindsets

Meeting the challenge of a dominant growth mindset: beware potentially destructive mindsets

Each of our four imperatives for profitable growth has a 'dark' side. Powerful market and personal forces can cause any one of the imperatives to become a potentially destructive mindset. Economic peaks and troughs tend to create too much or too little confidence. Furthermore, powerful cells within the management team often tend to rise to prominence at different times on the back of internally focused change programs or, conversely, externally focused market transactions.

The diagram above illustrates how either too much or too little confidence in the market, combined with an overly strong belief that all change should happen, can lead to any one of the imperatives becoming a destructive mindset that crowds out the other imperatives.

Thus, the management desire to change a poor performer into a healthy business creates the need for a 'Value Evangelist' to preach and implement the 'gospel' of value-based management. The quest for an attractive position becomes the domain of the 'Defensive Strategist'. Excitement about Continuous Innovation can set loose 'Visionary Innovators'. The need to sustain momentum may be delegated to 'Planner Organizers'.

Any one mindset can rise to prominence as an apparent 'silver bullet' solution, depending on the level of confidence in the market and on whether expectations about the required change are focused within organization or on the external environment. In our report, we also provide examples of what happens when a company becomes overly consumed by one of these mindsets.

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See also:

Long-term profitable growth - home

Our research

PA's Profitable Growth framework

Balancing the imperatives