New to Big
In The Growth OS, startup guru David Kidder and the Bionic Team reveal their blueprint for helping companies recapture their growth skills--by funding a portfolio of startups and monitoring their progress to encourage entrepreneurship within companies.
When David Kidder was invited to speak at GE's annual leadership conference in 2012, he yelled down to chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, "How many $50 million companies did you launch last year?" The answer was zero. But Immelt, rather than being angry or offended at the interruption, candidly said to his teams, "That was the most important question in the thirty-seven years of this conference."
The fact is, as Kidder shows in The Growth OS, entrenched thinking and outdated bureaucracy is at war with new ideas. Yet, of the top five companies by market cap in 2001, only Microsoft remains in 2016. Traditional companies have tumbled off the list.
To think like a scaled startup, companies today need to look for markets that haven't been discovered or created yet.
They need to identify a customer problem and work backward from the outside in to discover a business model for that solution.
The Growth OS is designed to instill the mindsets, methods, and tools that veteran venture investors and experienced entrepreneurs use to discover the future in the face of the unknowable. But even most bets placed by VC's fail, more than 80 percent of the time. That is why you need a portfolio of investments and a growth board to measure the progress of each business, only continuing to fund those that show validated progress.
