Blog Articles

A life tribute and some valuable life lessons learned from my youngest son, Drake William Norup

To build commercially successful products or services, it is critically important to understand the job customers are trying to get done.

The concept of making a business pivot is often misunderstood, and should always be considered against two other options: persevere or stop.

Investing in any scale-up or growth effort without having found Product/Market Fit is a guaranteed path to failure. Here’s how to do it.

Many growth leaders make a risky “leap of faith assumption” that there are ready and willing buyers for their offering.

Growth leaders must validate there is a market for a new product or service. You have to make something that people actually want to buy.

By observing the reasons why other organizations have failed, growth strategists can avoid making the same mistakes in their own business.

In order to grow the organization you ultimately have to increase sales. Here are 10 surprising, but proven, strategies to try in your organization.

Solve two big strategic growth planning challenges by segmenting your market and defining a profile of your ideal client.

Learn how to identify and avoid nine common challenges that can sink your growth strategy, and your company if you are not careful.

Complexity is the single greatest execution risk for any growth strategy. Simple is good. Complexity is bad.

The best and most successful growth leaders share some common characteristics. These attributes define the core DNA of a growth leader.

Ten time-tested and proven growth principles. If you follow them, they will reduce your up-front time and effort while significantly increasing the chances of success.

Growth strategists must confront the immediate challenges, not cover them up and hope they will go away. Things generally only get worse if we try to mask them.

A roadworthy bus, with the right driver, and the right people on the bus, sitting in the right seats, is a great start to reaching your desired destination.

The year 2020 was incredibly challenging on a personal and professional level, yet it offered some valuable and enduring lessons for us all to benefit from.

Highly effective growth leaders work harder and smarter, acting with a strong bias to action, and getting their hands dirty out in the market with their teams.

Regardless of your industry, size, or growth challenge, deploying these strategies will create a solid foundation for growth, and become success enablers.

Clarity on your value proposition, ideal client, and buyer’s “job to be done” are your secret strategy to developing effective messaging and greater B2B sales success.

The essence of great strategy is choosing what not to do. You will not be successful by trying to be all things to all people.

Everyone has an expert opinion about marketing, but most of them are wrong. When it comes to the “marketing jury” there is ultimately only one vote that counts.

Deciding to bring in a fractional CMO to help drive growth is a great idea. Finding and engaging the right one is not so easy.

There is no quick fix or magic formula to drive growth for the organization. It takes a disciplined approach and hard work.

Four tactical remedies that business leaders and growth strategists can use to counter each of the VUCA forces.

If we revert to a few proven fundamental strategies, and ask some basic questions, we are often in a much better position to start solving growth strategy challenges.

Being efficient at addressing urgent but less important issues does not necessarily make you more effective in the long-term. Avoid the efficiency trap.

Not every leader is prepared for the hard work of developing a growth strategy, and not every organization is ready or equipped to execute.

A proven growth strategy is the concept of a fractional CMO. However, it is not always easy to know the optimal time to bring one in.

There is a fine line for leaders when strategic planning between taking decisive action, and moving too fast.

Every growth organization needs a CMO to develop and execute strategy…and with the fractional CMO option, there is no excuse for not having one.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is one of the most challenging roles in the executive suite. These are the most common reasons they fail.

Having a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) on the team will help drive growth. Having the right CMO archetype will ensure success.

No matter the topic – there are no shortcuts to success. The same fundamental rule of effort applies – you have to show up. And, even more importantly, you have to do the work.

There may be no more critical, yet inconsistently defined, senior leadership role than that of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). But not every organization can justify one.

Every marketing and sales tactic can be mapped back to one of four core strategies that increase sales. These are the only ways to increase sales.

Many organizations and leaders struggle to identify VUCA threats and translate them into actionable inputs as they are making their strategic plans.

Marketing and sales are vital functions of almost every organization, yet they often live in isolation. They need each other in order to be successful.

Designed to help leaders and their teams deal with a VUCA environment, effectively plan the future of their organization, and take action.

As our new VUCA world continues to unfold, there will be unlimited opportunity to grow and thrive for those organizations who are best able to adapt.

The Management Cycle is the final, and arguably most important, element in the VUCA Strategic Planning framework – it is the vital process to manage execution of the plan.

Many leaders make a critical mistake when strategic planning – they don’t spend enough time gathering and evaluating real-world data that could shape or positively impact the outcome of their plan.

Strategy Portfolio is essentially an insurance policy – providing strategic options that are ready in case the primary strategy and plan do not work out.

A strategic plan by itself is useless, unless it is also accompanied by execution. This bias for action is vital to achieving successful outcomes.

For scenario planning you consider a range of potential future conditions, and your possible responses, so that you are prepared to act quickly if they hit you.

For those leaders who are paying attention and willing to do some hard work, now is an excellent time to be thinking about how to innovate and transform your organization for the future.

To effectively manage organizations, leaders need to consider VUCA factors when they set long-term goals and develop strategic plans to achieve them.

Leaders and their teams must make strategic decisions throughout the VUCA Strategic Planning process, including the selection of a strategy to develop into a plan.

The growing Work From Home (WFH) movement brings with it both challenges and opportunities for business leaders, and it surfaces many of the inequities in the workplace.

Formulating the strategy that an organization or team will use to achieve its envisioned future is a key component of the VUCA Strategic Planning process.

One of the most common challenges organizations experience when they are creating a VUCA strategic plan is around setting objectives, the SMARTER framework offers a solution.

Becoming a SEAL is much harder, and less glorious, than it looks to an outsider. No matter how challenging, they are committed to achieving success…

A thorough and honest assessment of your current reality will not only help inform your strategy, but it will also help to identify potential pitfalls and alternative scenarios to consider and prepare for.

Two things have become very clear – this level of VUCA disruption is not going away, and the need for strong leaders has never been greater.

In today’s disruptive VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) business environment it is critically important for organizations, teams, and individual contributors to have clarity on their vision of the future and what their long-term goals are.

Hope is never an effective strategy for solving problems. In this unpredictable and chaotic new VUCA business environment, we need to think strategically and take decisive action to overcome challenges.

To create an effective VUCA strategic plan it is important to clarify the mission, values, and purpose of your organization. They become a powerful planning foundation.

This crisis has shown us that rapid and significant changes to supply or demand can jeopardize the viability of an organization. A radical shock like COVID has severely tested and exposed many continuity plans.

With this new reality, it has become clear that the traditional approach to strategic planning is inadequate. We need a better approach, one that embraces VUCA instead of ignoring it.

While VUCA may not have killed traditional strategic planning, it has definitely exposed some shortcomings…

Almost every organization in every industry will be permanently altered in some way from the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Some thoughts on what the new normal might look like…

For the foreseeable future, volatility and uncertainty appear to be the only two things we can count on. VUCA provides a useful framework for effective strategic planning.

A crisis can provide the opportunity for real lasting change to take place. The crisis acts as the catalyst. From there we have to look for the opportunity, and then take action.

We can’t just sit and wait. We must also begin looking for new strategic planning frameworks to help us navigate and succeed in this new and uncharted territory.

The concept of walking before you run, and other startup lessons, have real application for our political and business leaders as we search for the new post-COVID normal…

When things start to feel like they are out of control, I begin searching for a new center of gravity…