8

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO PEOPLE

New to Big cannot happen without people. None of this works without the energy and enthusiasm of smart, dedicated, imaginative, collaborative, visionary, beautifully flawed human beings.

And yet you might be wondering, Do I have the right talent to pull this off? And even if they’re out there, how do I find them? How do I extract them from their day jobs and re-deploy them without disrupting entire systems? And then how do I convince them that this work will be rewarding, not career-killing?

That last question stems from a deeply ironic circumstance that has evolved over the last decade or so: When employees within large companies are reassigned to “innovation” teams, it can mean their career is slow-tracking or, worse, completely over at that company. While they’re engaged with “innovation,” they’ve been forgotten by the Big to Bigger promotion-generating machine. Some people go so far as to say that innovation departments are where careers go to die. Let’s just take a moment to acknowledge how deeply screwed-up that is: Our current systems literally punish the brave souls who take risks to build new things. So even if you’ve got dozens of natural-born entrepreneurs in your employee pool, they might not be eager to step up.

But wait! There’s more bad news! In a Big to Bigger organization, the people who succeed most are those who thrive on predictability and mitigating risk. But New to Big is about going into the unknown, looking around new corners, and pushing boundaries. In Big to Bigger, people get promoted for being right; in New to Big, success requires acknowledging what we don’t know and asking the right questions in order to learn. This dichotomy means that high-performers in a typical Big to Bigger company have cultivated exactly the wrong operating behaviors for New to Big work. The talent you need to power the Growth OS probably isn’t the talent that’s risen through the ranks already; it might need to be ferreted out. And, more broadly, to do New to Big successfully, you need to adapt your people-management infrastructure to find, motivate, retain, reward, and grow that talent.

FIRST, FIND THE ICONOCLASTS IN HR WHO WANT TO PARTNER WITH YOU

The crux of this organizational work splits into two parts. First we’ll need to adapt the current Big to Bigger people-management systems to support the new entrepreneur/cofounder job function. Every one of the mechanisms in the current Big to Bigger talent-management system needs to be evaluated through the lens of entrepreneurship and venture capital: talent identification, performance reviews, reporting structures, incentives, compensation, which behaviors are prized, and what kind of leaders are promoted. All of it will need to be modified a little, or maybe a lot. If this sounds like we’re standing up a whole new HR infrastructure, well, that’s partly right. Most adaptations will be small; others will feel nearly impossible. The good news is that we won’t need to do this work all at once (but we’ll need to start running small HR experiments right away).

The second half of the org work involves cultivating the skills and mind-sets that lead to entrepreneurial success in employees and leaders who show the most promise. Since the Growth OS work being done by employees is fundamentally different from their old work—and especially since they may be doing this new work side-by-side with coworkers who are still utilizing established company protocols—they will need training, coaching, and mentorship.

It should be apparent by now that to accomplish all of these goals, we will need a creatively minded partner in HR who can dedicate a good portion of their time to the Growth OS. If you’re worried that recruiting the ideal person will be a nightmare, rest easy; we’ve seen time and again that when we find the right HR partner, they are not only challenged, but also delighted by doing this work.

THE FOUR PILLARS

To guide the org work, you and your HR best friend need to start off with some inspiration and provocation. We’ve developed four pillars of talent principles that are essential to successfully implementing the Growth OS.

Pillar 1: Players and promoters

In the world of theater, there are two key groups of people necessary to successfully produce a play: “players,” which includes actors, designers, directors, and stage managers who are fully dedicated to the production at hand; and “promoters,” which includes agents, artist managers, producers, and others who are integral to the success of the show but are also working on other projects simultaneously.

All people touched by the Growth OS have needs within the program and must be cared for, whether they are “all in,” like players, or merely “involved,” like promoters. Promoters need to be attended to, not ignored or made to feel left out. Part of our mandate is to gain their support, remove roadblocks, respect their needs, and, above all, avoid damaging their careers.

Pillar 2: It must be safe to try

Throughout the process, participants will be asked to do things that are unsupported by the status quo. They may be pulled from their departments, assigned new managers, and told to abandon projects that are in progress. Doing this takes guts. And if it doesn’t work out, they need solid assurances that they will be taken care of. They know that abandoning their posts puts them at risk of being sidelined, and they are taking a mammoth risk by joining these teams. It’s vital that they know they will not be punished, stalled, demoted, or replaced if they step up to contribute.

“We always thanked the teams for the learnings; the teams that got their funding cut were treated no differently than the teams that continued on,” GE’s Eric Gebhardt insisted. “They saw that it was a safe environment to do that, that it wasn’t failure but validated learning. Building that trust was very important.”

Likewise, those folks have managers—within matrixed organizations, who may be multiple managers—who are down a person, and may even be accountable for their employee’s performance in that new role. (A role they have no visibility into, and no understanding of, by the way.) That’s a risk they should not be asked to take. So do whatever you need to do to make those former managers safe. Nobody’s career should be threatened by participation in the Growth OS program.

Pillar 3: Do the easy thing that’s good enough

For the right HR person, this principle is the most freeing. Consider that HR people are in a challenging situation: The programs and policies they roll out affect tens or hundreds of thousands of people, all at once. If they get one thing wrong, it can feel like the world is coming down around their heads. So HR people have been trained from their first job out of college to create “comprehensive,” “perfect,” and “buttoned-up” solutions that work for the largest number of people.

Here we’re inventing things that have never been tried before, but affect only twenty or thirty people at the beginning. It’s not necessary to roll out a perfect solution that’s scalable to tens of thousands of employees. In fact, that approach would be counterproductive! Instead, your HR partner should run small-scale experiments, just like the OA cofounders, because they’re doing the same thing: trying to learn as quickly and cheaply as possible. Instead of massive, comprehensive, and bulletproof, find the easiest thing that gets enough of the job done so that HR can learn whether their imagined solution will work as intended.

Creating easy, short-term fixes to accommodate the new entrepreneur function may not give you scalable solutions for the long term. It will, however, create solutions that work for the immediate future, teach you a lot, and buy your team time to figure out what a permanent solution might look like.

Pillar 4: Value performance of the team over the individual

Entrepreneurship is a collective endeavor. This means that individual effectiveness is only valuable if it contributes to team effectiveness. This philosophy is the polar opposite of the one held by most big organizations, so it’s important to note and absorb. It means that success is based on the group’s progress toward the collective goal, rather than on an individual’s contribution. In an early-stage startup, there are rarely performance evaluations—your company either continues to exist or it doesn’t. You’re either on the team or off. This reality creates laser focus on collective outcomes (“We only sold ten pairs of shoes today”) rather than individual activity (“I made the marketing page on schedule”).

Because the work, and how we hold participants accountable, is so different from the norm, it means that only leaders working within the Growth OS program are qualified to evaluate performance. Promoters may have opinions, but players are the ones who know what “good” means in this context.

Study these pillars and keep them top-of-mind as you shift your attention toward Growth OS team-building. Obviously your HR partner will need to be on board, but so will everyone else. Growth Board members and OA cofounders will need to adopt these philosophies for as long as they are engaged in this work.

Now let’s discuss how to track down the right people to staff those teams.

CREATE OPPORTUNITY FOR ENTREPRENEURS IN HIDING

At the beginning of this work there is often a period of hand-wringing. Leaders say, “We don’t have the right people to take on this work! No one in our company is doing anything like this.”

Rest assured, you’ve got everyone you need on the payroll already. Deep within your organization there are employees with entrepreneurial sensibilities who are attracted to ambiguity, love to experiment, and are constantly imagining a better way to solve a problem. They are constant learners and are not afraid to challenge deeply held assumptions, which is why they are more often seen as “misfits” rather than candidates for high-potential programs. So your first step is to coax them out of hiding by demonstrating the career-changing potential of doing this work.

That coaxing is essential: If anyone is strong-armed into this work, it will lead to misery. You can’t just tell someone, “Guess what? This is your job now.” If they’re not suited to entrepreneurial, growth-focused work, or if they’re good at it but not passionate about it, they’ll wither. (And resent the company for screwing up their career.) Ask, don’t demand; solicit volunteers, don’t draft unwilling participants.

Step 1: Screen for key traits

There’s a seemingly never-ending stream of books and articles eager to tell you which attributes and talents are always present in successful entrepreneurs. But the attributes and capabilities we’ve assembled have been carefully calibrated to identify people equipped to do Growth OS work within an established company.

It may be tempting to bypass screening for these key traits if you’ve got a venerable, time-tested entrepreneur already on staff. This was the case with an early Bionic partner; a senior leader had won awards for his entrepreneurial endeavors, made a small fortune off the businesses he’d built before joining the organization, and been on staff for several decades. Naturally, the company assumed he was a perfect choice and placed him on the OA team without considering the cofounder attributes screener. It turns out that he was truculent and resistant, and his previous experience clouded his ability to accept new approaches. His team suffered, and so did the work. This earned him a quick exit from the Growth OS work, and the company realized that the key cofounder traits were nonnegotiable.

Here are the traits we seek in Growth OS participants, and that you can use within your own company to screen for natural entrepreneurial aptitude:

GROWTH BOARD MEMBER TRAITS

Growth Mind-Set: Believes deeply in the importance of entrepreneurship and is passionate about bringing concepts and best practices into the organization. Driven to create outcomes grounded in customer needs.

Resilience: Thinks in terms of possibilities and is comfortable working through ambiguity to achieve highest growth. Willing to take appropriate risks and make decisions in uncertainty. Comfortable with nonconsensus.

Question-Based Leader: Uses questions to drive toward clarity and commercial truth. Recognizes and rewards productive failure. Uses evidence to validate or invalidate critical assumptions.

Accountability: Reports directly to the CEO. Has the sphere of influence and authority required to remove barriers (organizational, cultural, systems, etc.).

Disruptor: Challenges status quo and deeply held cultural and organizational norms, cutting through bureaucracy to accelerate outcomes.

Grants Permissions: Creates an environment where all feel comfortable expressing conflicting opinions. Creates conditions where bold ideas, staring down hard truths, and taking smart risks can exist.

EXECUTIVE SPONSOR TRAITS

Catalyst: Models the growth mind-set and enables others to do so as well.

Passionate: Has an intense belief in the opportunity and a strong desire to provide an impactful solution.

Respected: Has enough tenure and authority to remove barriers and provide access to their teams.

Supportive: Provides teams with guidance (approximately one hour per week) and backing for their asks of the Growth Board.

Gardener: Takes an eyes-on, hands-off approach with teams, guiding them to the right resources without telling them the answer or managing the process.

COFOUNDER TRAITS

Adaptable: Invents novel approaches. Figures out what to do when ready-made processes or techniques are inadequate.

Curious: Finds patterns between disparate, seemingly unrelated sources anticipating innovative ways to build and position new business ideas.

Humble: Demonstrates continuous personal development with the team and desire to learn from others. Sees collaboration as a mechanism for self-improvement.

Passion for Experimentation: Adeptly layers together experimentation with other research, testing, and metrics to reveal strengths and flaws in the current strategy and devise a clear path forward.

(There’s one more team you’ll need to staff—the Operations Team. We’ll dig into them in the next chapter.)

As you collect names and interview interested candidates, make sure they have these characteristics or show the potential to adopt them. Doing this will ensure success for both the individuals and the projects they drive.

Step 2: Foster self-selection

As we mentioned earlier, “volun-telling” people into this work is a terrible move. It’ll serve you far better to foster an environment that encourages folks with the desired traits to step up and volunteer.

The first move is for the CEO to become a Growth OS superfan.

If the messages from the top are positive and exciting, people are more likely to raise their hands. If the CEO is leading the Growth Board and vocally supporting this work, encouraging other senior leaders to follow suit, then talented employees will feel safe coming forward. Creating awareness and highlighting leadership’s enthusiasm will lay the groundwork.

David Taylor, CEO of Procter & Gamble, has modeled this well. He has invested in an internal Growth OS program named GrowthWorks, sits on the Enterprise Growth Board, and models the behavior as a learning leader. Kathy Fish, chief research, development, and innovation officer, and Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer, lead GrowthWorks with a centralized team designed to enable the business units. People with entrepreneurial spirits across P&G are raising their hands to get involved in this type of work, and in the process are identifying new opportunities for growth.

The second move in fostering self-selection is to offer easy, low-risk ways for employees to volunteer. You want to give people an opportunity to experience and understand what these new jobs are like, and you want to keep a list. You might not have a spot for them today, but you might have one soon.

CONSIDER CREATING A GROWTH OS–SPECIFIC JOB FAIR. Staff various stations with folks who can explain exactly what various roles will entail, and what participants will do at various stages of the process. Invite them to express interest, then put them on your watch list.

ANOTHER OPTION IS TO HOST A STARTUP WEEKEND. Invite all interested employees to a two-day intensive retreat where they’re given a prompt, asked to generate some ideas, and tasked with running a few tests. At the end of the weekend, each team pitches their solution. The goal is not to harvest actual business ideas; it’s to find out who is both interested in and talented at entrepreneurial work. You don’t need to give them all roles right away. Instead, you can create a pipeline of interested folks to draw from as you expand the work. (And, obviously, this doesn’t have to occur on a Saturday and Sunday. Any two consecutive days will work.)

Step 3: Create safety for exploration

Earlier in the chapter, we mentioned that engaging in innovation work within a large company can be career suicide. Switching gears to focus on building new products or offerings has often been a potential career-limiting move, and one that many people actively fear. Once someone was uprooted from the core to work with an innovation team, they frequently weren’t welcomed back into the core after the innovation team wrapped up its work. No one was advocating for them at talent calibration meetings because they weren’t part of core teams. Their positions had often been backfilled. (And what if the innovation “failed”? Their “personal brand” within the core might have taken a hit.)

A few years back, we saw this happen to a Growth OS cofounder. She’d been selected from her position in the consumer insights department to focus on a new endeavor, but was still reporting to her old department manager. He had no idea what her new work entailed or how to evaluate her success, so he just stuck to the same performance expectations he’d been using for everyone else in his unit. She continually tried to explain the work she was completing and the skills she was learning, but her manager was totally unprepared to process it. She felt out to sea, and he felt ill-equipped to guide her. And once she had finished her Growth OS work, neither had any idea how to reintroduce her into the department or get her back up to speed. Think back to Pillar 2: Safe to Try. Because the organization wasn’t fully prepared, it was not safe for either one of them to have her try the Growth OS assignment.

Now, we have said already that cofounders and all Growth OS staff need to report to their respective Executive Sponsors instead of their old supervisors. For the duration of this work, they need to be evaluated only by other people involved in the work. But we also make sure to build mechanisms that keep employees protected while they’ve stepped away from their current roles and departments.

To avoid turning the Growth OS into a regrettable career-limiting-move machine, companies must prepare from day one for people to return to the core. Not everyone will want to go back—many may find this entrepreneurship track a better fit for their skills and goals—but the off-ramp must exist for those who want it after a Growth OS tour of duty. That can mean creating a new sponsorship approach that assigns a senior leader and an HR partner who are close to the work to advocate for them. It can also mean crafting clear communications around how their new skills and mind-sets will support the core once they’ve returned. The reentering employee will want the tools to evangelize the program and train others in the growth skills and mind-sets they have learned.

TALENT TRANSPLANT PROTOCOLS

While the Growth Board members and Exec Sponsors will add Growth OS work to their existing plates, it’s critical that cofounders are fully dedicated to their OA work. For many, it will be on a temporary basis—eighteen months, two years, maybe a bit longer—but during that time, they must be 100 percent dedicated.

If an entrepreneur were only 30 percent dedicated to their startup, they would never be funded by a VC. Investors may take meetings with or offer advice to part-time entrepreneurs, but they would never write a check to back a founder who hadn’t gone all-in themselves. This work cannot be a side project that only gets a fraction of anyone’s time and attention. Here’s why: Entrepreneurs need to obsess about the customer problems they are solving in order to uncover the insights that create massive commercial opportunity. And more to the point, in an enterprise, trying to do both jobs (Growth OS and core) creates conflicting incentives, and which one will get the front seat? The one you’ve been working on forever and that will determine your next promotion.

C-level and senior leadership have to champion 100 percent dedication and should be willing to go to bat to defend its importance. When that happens, people at all levels know it’s safe to give their heart and soul to innovation work.

So you’ve screened a prospect, found her suited to the work, and granted her an OA cofounder role. How do you extract her from her current role, department, and workload?

There’s no single right answer to that question, unfortunately, but we can definitely circle back to Pillar 3: Do the Easy Thing That’s Good Enough. When you’re just revving up that New to Big engine, you don’t have to have a scalable HR protocol in place to take people out of existing roles and reassign them to OA teams without disruption. You just need to rig up a temporary system that will work for your first batch of innovators, which is usually a dozen people or fewer.

Maybe that means setting up all the OAs as a separate organization within the whole. Maybe that means moving all the cofounders to the same existing business unit temporarily. Your own corporate structure, payroll protocols, and HR systems will dictate what’s possible and what’s outlandish. Feel free to assemble a solution that will enable the work to begin, then dig into the details of how to make it scalable as the project progresses.

So far, so good. But what about the folks who aren’t intimately involved in this venture-building work, but whose support is crucial to its ongoing success? What about those promoters—the former line managers of the newly minted cofounders, supporting functions like legal, finance, compliance, HR (basically anyone who can say no, but has nothing at stake for this work to succeed)—how do we support and engage them?

PROMOTER MANAGEMENT 101

Promoters who understand the value of Growth OS work and feel respected by the people doing it are happy promoters. And happy promoters don’t make trouble for the people doing the Growth OS work.

Unhappy promoters, on the other hand, can be serious detractors.

We once worked with a partner where we kicked off the work as we always do: attracting cofounders, scoping out opportunity areas, and setting up OA teams to be 100 percent dedicated, with Exec Sponsors serving as the new day-to-day manager for the cofounders. But in this company, the cofounders’ former line managers were technically still responsible for them in the HR system; those former line managers were still on the hook for the cofounders’ year-end reviews and for compensation and promotion recommendations. So they kept their weekly one-on-one meetings with the cofounders, and asked them for regular readouts, creating several hours of additional work for the cofounders each week. The cofounders didn’t complain, but the extra work took a toll on them and made them concerned about their upcoming evaluation and compensation discussions, since their Growth OS work didn’t neatly map to their divisions’ development tracks.

After a month or two, one of the cofounders casually mentioned this concern to the Exec Sponsor, who was stunned; they didn’t know this was going on, and they were understandably concerned about cofounder morale and focus. At the same time, they recognized how important it was to keep the former managers in the loop and to overcommunicate the experiences and skills the cofounders were developing in this work. So they looped in their Growth OS HR partner, and together, they sat down with the former managers to create a plan to give them monthly updates on the work, as well as greater transparency into the coaching and development plans for the cofounders. Then they scheduled time for everyone—including the cofounders—to talk about compensation and evaluation plans for the OA team so they felt safe to experiment, fail, and iterate.

And it worked like a charm. Exuberant support from a top leader combined with open, welcoming communication proved to be a highly effective promoter-management strategy. It is one that we’ve since adopted for other partners, and one that will likely work as you install the Growth OS in your own organization.

People fear what they don’t understand, but when they feel informed, they’re less likely to lash out. It’s crucial to be transparent and open about Growth OS work from the very start, especially because it is fundamentally different from typical corporate transformation efforts.

Longtime employees may have seen internal experiments before. Let’s all embrace agile transformation! Or build our software differently! Or utilize lean techniques! Whatever it is, let’s all do it together!

This is different. This is a small group of people who are wholly committed to a subset of work. And to catalyze that deep change, we draw a circle around those committed people. We might start with 30. By year two, it could grow to 150, which is still very small for a large organization. It’s a tiny subset that appears, from the outside, to be getting special treatment and following special rules. People outside that circle are curious. They feel threatened. They want to know how, when, and if this little circle of people doing compartmentalized work is going to force them to change their own working habits. Is this a new wave coming, and if so, how do they prepare to ride it out?

The best way to inoculate against that fear is through open sharing of information, as the last example shows. And although top-level support and vocal buy-in are essential, so is recruiting an HR business partner. Having someone skilled in both communications and people management to help quell fears, manage rumor mills, and answer questions can be a lifesaver.

Speaking of HR, let’s revisit Pillar 3 one more time, shall we? Do the Easy Thing That’s Good Enough is an important mind-set for internal HR staff to adopt as the Growth OS rolls out. If some subset of HR is open to being on a journey along with the OA teams and Exec Sponsors, if they embrace the idea that this is a grand experiment that they’re taking part in, they’ll see how they can contribute to this new operating system rather than feel dragged along with it. These folks will have the opportunity to design a new kind of talent management solution, one linked to a growth mind-set, and one that can be scaled. But also one that should be tinkered with, piloted, and tested on a small scale before a companywide rollout is implemented.

Once they see that we’re not changing everybody—we’re changing one teeny-tiny sliver of the company for a temporary period of time in order to validate something that could be more permanent—many HR team members are incredibly relieved. In fact, some find it to be a breath of fresh air and end up adopting experimentation quicker than other functions! HR folks are among the most important promoters, and getting their support is essential to making this organizational change possible.

REVISING REWARDS SYSTEMS

As the program matures, an important task is determining how New to Big work should be compensated and rewarded. We wish we had a one-size-fits-all formula you could plug into your current systems to translate Big to Bigger compensation into New to Big, but we just don’t. Compensation and rewards are often both industry-specific and fantastically convoluted.

That said, here are some things to keep in mind as you customize your rewards systems to suit Growth OS work:

HOLD STEADY AT THE START: Participants’ compensation should ideally be held unchanged for at least the first six months of the program. This gives everyone a chance to see if they are a good fit for the work. This also has the benefit of being easy to implement and good enough (see Pillar 3).

MAKE EXPECTATIONS CLEAR AT THE OUTSET: Since Growth OS participants will be evaluated based on new and different criteria, make sure they all know that from day one. For instance, Growth Board members will be held accountable for practicing question-based leadership and asked to improve if they choose to monologue endlessly instead. But they all need to know that ahead of time so they can adjust their behaviors accordingly.

GET INPUT FROM THE EXECUTIVE SPONSOR: To compensate everyone fairly, performance expectations need to be codesigned by someone who has a deep understanding of the work being done. Your HR partner should be sure to involve the Executive Sponsor.

DEFINE BOTH “GOOD” AND “BAD” CRITERIA: Since project failure is not to be feared throughout this process, it’s essential to let people know which behaviors are considered detrimental. For instance, overbuilding a prototype might be a ding-worthy offense, while getting clear evidence from an underbudget experiment could be bonus-worthy behavior.

REWARD TEAMS, NOT INDIVIDUALS: Once again, this is work that must be done collectively. That means it needs to be rewarded collectively. Doing this motivates everyone to collaborate more effectively and enthusiastically.

COMMUNICATE SUCCESSES: Articulate when and why people within the Growth OS are being promoted. Deliberately tout these successes so that everyone within the company will know the work is being valued.

And, especially at the outset, be flexible and willing to make changes. A compensation system that made sense on paper may wreak havoc in practice. Find nonfatal ways to test your ideas, and welcome their failure. It’s okay; we’re all experimenting together, remember?

Being transparent is especially vital when it comes to recognition and rewards given to Growth OS participants because it impacts recruitment. If the company at large doesn’t see this way of working as connected to career progression, it will be challenging to attract new volunteers when you’re ready to expand. But if your employees can see clearly that working and operating in an entrepreneurial way can lead to personal growth, promotions, and raises, they will be thrilled to get on board.

MEASURING SUCCESS

Measuring success of the OA teams may seem pretty straightforward: If the solutions they test and eventually bring to market scale and become profitable, success!

But organizational success is more ephemeral. You want to be able to attract, retain, develop, and land the right people for the Growth OS. In order to do that, you need all the mechanisms of effective management—clear jobs, aligned pay, recognition, advancement potential, career growth, and a good understanding of what it takes to be successful. If your people are growing and succeeding in finding and building new businesses, then your organization is probably pretty good. If you end up with a thriving ecosystem of repeat entrepreneurs, then you’ve won.

Yes, you want your portfolio of solutions to be thriving, but the growth of the people managing that portfolio should be acknowledged, too. That growth, and the skills and wisdom that accompany it, often become gifts to the core.

When we worked with Nike, the company had identified and validated a real and ongoing need among schools to design and produce small batches of sports team uniforms and fan gear. So we began to explore a direct-to-consumer model, a way for schools to create and order just what they needed, with accessible pricing and quick turnaround times.

The team went pretty far down that road, mocking up what this new model might look like. But instead of launching it as a standalone business—which Nike could’ve done very easily—the company realized that there was little risk and lots of benefit to bringing that work into the core. So that’s what they did—gifting this success to the entire organization. And it has literally changed the conversation for how the core team is functioning. The entrepreneur who had been leading it went on to explore another idea, bringing all her learning to the new OA.

When you’re crafting your own organizational protocols, remember that there are multiple ways to measure success. If the core is changing and evolving because of Growth OS work, that can be absolutely priceless to the company overall. We’ve worked with many companies who hired us for growth outcomes, but reaped invaluable benefits back to the core in terms of innovative thinking and appreciation for the value of change. When they see the value in both, we know they’ve taken this work to heart.

Ultimately, this organizational work is the backbone of New to Big success. It empowers cofounders to be all in, supports Executive Sponsors to catalyze learning, and builds accountability for Growth Board members to become ambidextrous leaders.

So build that backbone first, then read on to chapter this page to learn how to build a permanent New to Big capability throughout your company.