The importance of CEOs and FDs to the success (or failure) of private equity backed companies is relatively self-evident. But to what extent can we glean useful clues from data regarding incumbent or candidate executives before either doing additional assessment work or making a decision?...

…. How do we get important things done in growth companies? Take the examples of Sales and Operations which are at the core of most businesses. For starters, we create dedicated functions and populate them with people who have relevant skills and manage them through senior managers with relevant experience.

…. Managers in growth companies expect to work hard and it is desirable that things run reasonably ‘hot’ because that forces teams to ignore trivial issues. But frequently that can tip over into unhelpful over-loading where we see the following phenomena:

…. Pretty much all the companies Catalysis gets to work with are going through a transition - or several transitions at once.

…. Some months ago, I argued that formal value creation methodologies – created to address the problems of a less favourable investing environment – could be self-defeating unless balanced by greater attention to how teams and organisations build value in practice (which Catalysis refers to as value enablement.

The previous article concluded that current Value Creation approaches may, through their assumptions and methods, cause various dysfunctions which impede value creation. It proposed, by way of a counterbalance and partial cure, ‘value enablement’.

A few years ago, there was a major study carried out by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) at Aston University which looked at the performance over time of 48,000 high growth firms (HGFs) in the UK. HGFs are defined by the OECD as companies ‘with average annualised growth…