Growing the Top Line

CHAPTER 8Creating the Team

It’s all about the team. Get the right team, and you’ll do well. Get it wrong, and it won’t matter how good the plan is. Sheri Dodd, whom we met in Chapter 5, is a vice president and general manager at Medtronic Medical Care Management Services, and she put it this way:

Sheri: It’s funny, I think when I was chartered the first time to build a growth plan, I didn’t have appreciation for what was really being asked of me. I thought I was being asked kind of to go do something individual. You know, go get some job done, and I figured that if I could just spend enough time thinking about it myself and organizing my thoughts, carving out, say, 40 hours or 80 hours, I could probably just go knock it out of the park.

Cliff: It doesn’t work like that?

Sheri: It doesn’t work like that.

Traditionally, strategy has been the domain of the chief strategy officer, product line GM, owner, and so on. “Ivory tower” strategy is a term that talks about how classically strategies developed by these roles in an ivory tower – the rarified air of the thinker – are then passed down to business units for execution.

This is simply a flawed approach, and unfortunately from the early days in my career I have the scars to prove it.

At Beacon, we ask that our clients staff each Growth Framework exercise with the representation from each functional area. At a minimum, we want to have the following organizations represented:

• Strategy
• Marketing
• Sales
• Ops
• R&D
• HR
• Finance
• Legal