Tag Archives: Attributes

How Do You Keep Your Culture in the Face of Rapid Growth? Ten Points

Situation: A CEO’s company is facing rapid growth. The CEO is concerned that the cordial team culture that he has carefully nurtured will be strained as the company adapts to this growth. The present culture is characterized by lack of politics and truthful, frank communications. How do you keep your culture in the face of rapid growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company currently markets its culture, complemented by a solid history of performance. Clients receive highly personalized service at a competitive cost. This combination attracts and retains clients.
  • The company’s employees are a happy, competent group that enjoys what they are doing. This differentiates the company from other firms all by itself.
  • Identify the key attributes of the company’s culture. This will simplify internal and external communication when discussing what makes the culture special.
  • Use one several tools available to develop behavioral profiles of the current employees. This will help to understand how team members interact with each other. It will also help to build profiles for ideal additional employees as the team expands.
  • Hire an expert do a formal evaluation of the team around individual and group dynamics, as well as bottlenecks in the current structure and culture. This will help determine how scalable the company’s current culture is.
  • Grow at the rate the company’s culture allows, not at the rate that salespeople bring in new business. With gradual, careful growth size will less of an issue as it would be if the company were to simply grow as fast as possible.
  • The more the company grows organically – through additional business from existing clients – the fewer additional clients the company needs to meet growth objectives. This means adding fewer new employees to maintain target client/employee ratios.
  • If the plan is to grow larger, consider growing around core groups of 9-12 employees, perhaps in distinct locations with good communication between the groups. In the military, operating groups are 9 to 12 soldiers; the more specialized and highly trained the group the more it tends toward 9 soldiers instead of 12.
  • There is a Zen saying that a healthy tree grows as tall as it can. Use this as your guide.
  • The key role of the CEO is as CCO – Chief Culture Officer!

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What Leads in Building Brand Focus? Five Factors

Situation: A company faces a question branding a new product – what should lead the branding focus: product design or product attributes that will be an eventual part of the branding strategy? Which should lead in building brand focus?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • There are two areas of focus – each an important part of the overall trademark and branding strategy:
    • A distinct name or symbol, for example Amazon.com or eBay, will gain the right kind of attention and be easy for potential customers to remember. The prime risk here is stepping on someone else’s mark.
    • Your overall branding strategy. The point here is not confusing your customers. Marketing people will advise you to KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid! One tack is simplifying the complexity of technology.
  • It is important to develop a consistent set of product attributes – one that you know through research will resonate with your client base – before your Alpha launch. It is dangerous to conduct an Alpha launch without clarity on this point. Subtleties of the eventual brand do not need to be finalized, but the overall framework of key product attributes should be consistent and clear from the beginning.
  • Design and the development of important product attributes ideally take place in synch with each other. Positioning will depend on your audience, and the unique needs and expectations of the audience.
  • The name itself could be important. Being clear and easy to spell may be important. Test alternative names for this trait.

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