…. Growth company boards spend lots of time thinking about how to get the best performance from existing executives and which new roles may be needed to cope with expansion. Bandwidth and skill constraints are weighed up against budgets, and the trade-offs between those factors are debated.

…. 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:

You are, of course, very familiar with financial balance sheets and how they relate to on-going activities (think P&L) and concrete outcomes (cash). Likewise, you know about the category of intangibles, i.e. assets you cannot touch, see or count easily such as software…

It is not surprising, that with so much going on in the news at the moment, we tend to stay focused on coping with the short term disruptions we are faced with: a second wave of Covid, the messy economic environment and the unpredictable implications of Brexit…