A Predictable Pattern of Success?

Every working day in America, 26 million people are looking for ways to grow their organization, division, department, group or team.  Every day they re-discover that growth is tough.

For at least 150 years leaders and managers have struggled with growth, many of them with great success.

So why isn’t there a recognized pattern by now – a dependable dynamic for consistently and repeatedly achieving growth?  I get asked this question a lot.

Les McKeown believes he knows what those principles and patterns are, and he’s written a book about it published today. “Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track – and Keeping It There” is based on his personal experience in launching over 40 businesses before he turned 35, then helping others launch hundreds more as the co-founder and CEO of a business incubation company.

McKeown says that having been intimately involved in the launch and growth of so many businesses, he couldn’t help but notice consistent growth patterns that successful companies followed.  “In most cases, it wasn’t that the successful business owners or managers had carved out a growth strategy that was highly unique to them, although of course some did,” says McKeown.  “What was noticeable was that successful growth in any company, however it was achieved, was always preceded by the same trace elements and left behind the same fingerprints.  It was like discovering that sustainable growth has a very distinct DNA, one which cannot be avoided.”

By unlocking that DNA, McKeown believes any manager or leader can accelerate, sustain, and scale growth in their organization far faster and more effectively than trying to do so by experiment or chance.  By positioning your organization on one of seven possible stages in the growth curve, McKeown says most managers and leaders will intuitively understand what they need to do to get to the next stage.  And just in case the answer isn’t completely obvious, he devotes one chapter to each of the seven stages, in which he details the most effective ways of getting from each stage to the next.

‘Predictable Success’ is a fun read too – It is filled with stories and characters from his own experiences (fictionalized, he says, to protect the innocent), and in the second half of the book he lays out a detailed, step-by-step guide to getting to the optimum stage – what he calls ‘Predictable Success’ – and staying there.

What have your predictable indicators of success been?

Want to learn more? Join a call today at Tuesday at 3pm ET with Les and panelists, Bob Burg and Andrea J Lee. The second call is Friday at 12pm ET with Les, Michael Bungay Stanier and Alexis Martin Neely