Living The Growth Experience (GX)
Over the past year, I’ve been writing a new book, Ascending Growth, with co-authors Eve Chen and Ljubica Radoicic.
What started as some informal feedback on a friend’s, Eve’s, manuscript, became a work project that we three collaborated on. I eventually ended up joining as a co-author.
Writing a book, for me, becomes all encompassing. I tend to be thinking about and tinkering with ideas and the manuscript all the time.
Although, in fact, Ascending Growth is a book aimed at mid-career B2B marketers wanting to step up to CMO and CEO, the book is also more generally about leadership and change, and career growth.
I was excited that we were writing a slightly different (and I hope, better) type of business book, one aimed at the person/leader as well as the performance. There are new paradigms and tested learnings, but there is also a fair dose of coaching and encouragement as well.
With the manuscript now ready for editing, to be published later this year, it has given me “heads up” time to think about the big picture again, and what I’m trying to do at work and in life.
Over the past year, as a result of the book, I’d put on the backburner a project to develop experiential learning about Creativity for Leaders. When I began to work on it again last week I realized that there were many parallels in ways of thinking about things that also feature in the Ascending Growth book. For example both are about empowering you to move forward with the paradigms/tools, examples and encouragement to tackle big challenges at work and in your life.
In this article, I thought it would be neat to give you a quick preview of GX (Growth Experience), one of the new models in the book (another is RVC here). We’ll save a detailed walkthrough of the model until later (and the book). Instead I want to use the GX model as a basis of sharing some personal learnings from the book project, and potential leadership and life lessons/reminders for you.
GX (Growth Experience)
The central idea in GX is that sustainable growth happens when there is a win-win-win at the overlap of three areas:
- Organizational Revenue (and profit) Growth, made sustainable by the development of a set of 10 integrated organizational capabilities
- Customer/Market Growth in terms of the Customer’s financial and non-financial metrics, driven by insights from the firm into what will help the customer win
- People Growth — that is, the team (and leader) develop confidence, new skills, “esteem”, and so on, as measured by engagement, retention, 360 feedback, relationships with other parts of the organization and the industry
This GX relationship is shown in the diagram below:
We felt that although CX (Customer Experience) had helped organizations deal with the customers more efficiently digitally, it wasn’t sufficient in itself to provide a growth roadmap into the future. The CX concept had also already, we felt, become overloaded and pulled in different directions resulting in it lacking common definition or understanding.
Enter GX. GX is not just about efficiency (as often is the case with CX). We recognized that often the right answer for growth in the medium to long term is to intentionally add more engagement/time (rather than less) with the customer in the short term, through new or different conversations focused on their growth, for example.
Through the book, we’re seeking to help readers build that feeling of electricity in their organization, a virtuous cycle, where things just work together well and build upon each other. That is the growth experience, which is part and parcel of ascending growth in the organization, your team, in your career, and in your life.
The GX model also replaces the idea of “the funnel” with the concept of “orbits”. We talk about the need to create a certain type of “gravity” that helps retain, and expand the relationship with both customers and employees. More important than ever based on the past couple of years. We do orbits with the customer and the team rather than to them.
You’ll often hear in business books a kind of abstract discussion about building organizational capabilities. As if you just buy the capability at a store and plug it in. You get a kit in the mail and follow the instructions to bolt the new capability together, and so on.
The reality, as we all know, is that there is a litany of failed (technology) projects that were ostensibly based on this type of plug and play assumption.
Instead, we’ve taken a leader-centric view of how to build alignment and alliances within the organization to provide the platform for growth (new capabilities, new outcomes). This might include new technology, or getting more value from what is there, or simply utilizing the power of people working well together “on the same page”. The book is focused on building this alignment between Sales, Marketing and Finance, with leadership support, but the concept applies generally and strategically as well.
The last thing I want to say about the approach in the book is that it intentionally flips the paradigm of most business books that only focus on driving business results. Instead, this book is about empowering you with the tools, learnings and encouragement that enable you to ascend to the next step in your career, whatever that means for you.
Of course this involves building a track record of (financial) results, but the book isn’t only about the results per se, it’s about getting you into the place where you achieve the results, and thus can move to the next stage.
For some, the next stage will be to move up or on to better things, again and again. For others it will be to create a particular kind of lifestyle and legacy, perhaps working harder now so that you don’t have to later on.
Reflections on The Growth Experience
While writing the book and immediately afterwards I asked myself “Am I living the Growth Experience?” Is my business growing, am I growing, are my customers growing?
At the time these questions are more easily asked than answered satisfactorily and, in fairness, were probably worded more along the lines of “what am I doing (writing another book)!?”
1) Business Growth
My business (Total Life Complete) was growing since a piece of the book planning and project management involved paid work. For a while, I’ve offered production services around writing, audio and video for client/artist projects, I just haven’t advertised that fact much.
The project would also provide a credential for TLC as a production company, potentially with a broader business development perspective (helping clients to further monetize their knowledge/content through podcast, video, consulting, business models and so on).
With my founder hat on, I’m always happy to have new business (!) but I also know that there is also a balancing act between cashflow and strategic growth. In my case, I started the business, and am steering the business to move away from hourly rates to developing assets that continue to pay off over time. I want to have a successful business, but part of that success is enabling a degree of flexibility around where and when I work on the business, versus the many other things I’d like to do with my time and energy in life.
But like I say it’s a balancing act. In the past I’ve been too strict on saying “no” to work that didn’t fit my preconceived idea of strategic or what I thought I should be doing, only to later move in that direction after the opportunity had passed! Lesson: when someone is offering you money to do something that might appear tangential to your business, and they are motivated and a good operator in the market, listen and think deeply before saying no (or yes)!
2) People
From a personal perspective, writing a book can sometimes be a grind, no matter how much you believe in the project and/or the people!
For me, the opportunity cost of being full immersion into one project (i.e. the book) was that I had less/no time to work on other projects, such as music production, course development and VR, which were originally slated for the second half of last year.
I was often motivated in the morning but mentally tired after working on the book all day. Given that I also have much to do in the day-to-day childcare and domestics of our household, I found it difficult to rally all the time in the evening after the kids were in bed.
So I had to constantly ask myself if I’d made the right decision with respect to the book versus other business and personal projects. What, if any, downstream “asset like” opportunities would come out of book? I’m an optimist, and all signs on paper and in practice were good but I didn’t know. It didn’t always feel good. Remember, I’d already written a book for myself, and got the learnings from that process. I’d checked that box, yet here I was again! I’ve also jumped out of a plane in the past, doesn’t mean I want to do it again!
3) Customer/Market
From a customer perspective, I remained convinced that the book would deliver both business and personal value to my immediate customers (co-authors), the eventual readers, and to a tranche of potential future customers of my business who might want to embark on their own project.
I started Total Life Complete to help busy professionals experience more out of life… by creating (shared) experiences with a purpose in different formats: content, learning, events and so on. I could see that helping people chase their dreams through coaching and hands-on writing a book, or starting a podcast, for example was on brand and had the kind of business and personal value that could provide a win-win. Feeling that you are making a difference is part of finding meaning at work (and in life).
In addition to all of this, writing a book about marketing was a yearlong reminder about what I needed to do to get more from my own business and life. My “store” needed more assets added to it, assets that were built out of specific insights into my customers, i.e. you. I needed to follow the advice in the book (including my own)! I needed to build the audience by engaging more often, and in smaller chunks than only books and long form articles! I finally set up the Complete community on LinkedIn to move the kinds of things I’m talking about here in a conversation, and help you to build your support network. I’m still trying to focus what I’m putting out, so that it makes some kind of sense to you.
What I’m getting at in this section, and in my framing of GX, was that work and life are/could/should be a growth experience that can be dialed up and gain its own momentum. It is certainly one to be lived and enjoyed. Also, the growth experience is an experience that is shared with others. Work can, and should, be one of the great growth experiences and opportunities for self-expression in life, if you’re doing it right, and in the right place.
You and The Growth Experience
As I’ve said before, I really only talk about me in these articles because sometimes stories are more powerful than a list of facts. I know that there are thousands of you out there wanting to make a new move in work and in life. And perhaps something you read here, or perhaps this stacked with other stories and examples, prompts you to take that step.
Framing your work and life as a growth experience can be refreshing, and might help surface new ideas and opportunities. At the least it might convince you of the need to do something now come up with said ideas and opportunities, and to seek out knowledge, new contacts and experiences that move you along that track.
The growth experience in the broader context is like a train that you step on. It starts slow but builds speed and momentum, then it really chugs along.
Can you hear the whistle blowing? Will you step on the train?
Thanks for reading, please see links below for more info on the book, how to get free chapters, and access the Ascending LinkedIn community (just launching). Until next time!
