Ladder Stage

Development-Growth-Profitability

Companies which are clocking an average growth rate and want to move towards better growth need to analyze its capabilities, opportunities, competitive scenario and the vision, in order to set its strategic objective.

Ladder stage is when the organizations have to aim for reaching higher levels in business performance and organizational capabilities. Organizations have to leverage on the strengths they have built and sense the external opportunities and internal potential to forge ahead with business growth strategy. Organizations formulate growth strategies as a response to disruptions in the market place or to gain a competitive advantage to grow business or to push the business growth according to the goals set for the next couple of years. The ideal growth paradigm organizations must embrace is building the Growth Engine in the organization.

Organizations can evolve from being responsive to the growth opportunities to creator of growth opportunities. Growth phase needs both Stability and Agility in order to promote growth. Stability brings in consistency which in turn gives confidence to be agile in embracing challenges and risks to take up new opportunities.

Competitive Avantage -> Responsiveness to Disruptions -> Agility in Embracing Opportunity -> Creating Opportunities with Growth Engine

—Organizational Evolution in Ladder Stage—
Organizations will have to ponder on some critical questions to arrive at a Growth Strategy and Focus Areas…

• Are you satisfied with your Growth rate?
• How far are you from your dream?
• Do your products and services contribute in creating competitive advantage?
• Are your teams capable and empowered in sustaining the competitive advantage?
• Are the employees firmly on the learning curve?
• Does the organizational culture promote the growth-mind-set in people?
• Are the systems and processes efficient and flexible to embrace the dynamic customer preferences?
• Do your manufacturing processes and technology support the responsiveness of the organization?
• Do you manage customer experience and customer engagement?
• Is customer experience & engagement a marketing function? Or embraced across the organization?
• Do you have leadership at various levels?
• Do you manage leadership pipeline?
• Do you have a multi-vendor-sourcing?
• Does your brand command a brand recall among your customers?
• Is your organization ready to build a Growth Engine?

Strategic objective analyzed at granular level helps in formulating the Strategy. Pursuing the Strategic Objective is a three step ladder comprising of Development, Growth and Profitability phases. Development phase is about building organizational infrastructure and capabilities to achieve the strategic objective. Growth phase is the implementation of strategy across the organization with key strategic initiatives, plans and critical decisions, which brings in the growth for the organization as set by the leadership. Growth phase is when the organizations achieve their set goal but the organizations can reach the pinnacle only when they translate the success into profitability and operational excellence, which can be attained in the Profitability phase, ability to make profits.
This cycle of Development, Growth and Profitability in the ladder stage backed by Growth Engine is found in organizations’ strategic journey of becoming matured and visionary companies.