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The 10 Commandments of Effective Growth Strategy

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“Business principles are only as good as the practices that back them up.”

– Chip Conley

Developing effective growth strategy is never easy.

The good news: While it is difficult, it is not impossible.

Fortunately, there are a few 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.

Over the span of many years in growth leadership and consulting roles, I have enjoyed great success by following these simple, yet powerful, fundamentals. Now you can too.

If you follow these guiding principles, in sequential order, you will have the building blocks to create an effective growth strategy for your organization.

The 10 Commandments

Most of us are aware of the Ten Commandments, the set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship that play a fundamental role in Judaism and Christianity.

While not quite as enduring or carved in stone like the original Ten Commandments, I believe these ten growth strategy principles can be very useful and informative for leaders seeking to grow their organization.

Here they are:

1 – Know Who You Are

This growth strategy commandment is first for a reason.

Why? In order for effective strategic planning to take place, you have to know who you are. In this context, “you” is referring to the organization.

This is your starting point.

Knowing the Core Ideology (Mission, Values, and Purpose) of your organization, and ensuring they are in alignment with your product(s)/service(s) and brand, is crucial for effective growth strategy.

If these elements are not in alignment, your growth initiative is highly likely to fail before it ever gets to see the light of day.

2 – Know Where You Want to Go

Every leadership team has dreams and aspirations for where they want to take the organization. Knowing your Envisioned Future (Vision, and Long-term Goals) is vitally important for effective strategic planning and execution.

As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, then how will you know when you get there?

Having clarity around your desired future state will provide focus, inspiration, and a convenient measuring stick to track your progress.

3 – Have a Plan

Once you know your starting point, and your intended destination, you are then in an excellent position to plot out a path forward for the organization.

In strategic planning, I call this stage the growth strategy thesis.

It is the product of all your understanding, insight, and best thinking about how you will navigate the Strategic Gap that exists between where you are today and your destination.

Your growth strategy thesis and plan become the roadmap you will use to reach the long-term goals of the organization.

Why is it a thesis? Because it is your best guess as to the path forward. The truth is you will not know until you start executing. Your strategy thesis is what you and your team are going to follow until you learn otherwise from market feedback. Then you can listen and pivot as required in order to keep moving towards your long-term goals.

There are many distractions for growth leaders when creating a strategic plan. The most successful ones focus on the fundamentals first:

  • Vision before strategy.
  • Strategy before tactics.
  • Focus on the big rocks first, in priority order.
  • Walk before you run.

4 – Get Real

Growth leaders need to practice a special kind of honesty.

This involves much more than just being truthful in our business dealings. Growth leaders need to have radical candor in assessing their organization, its product(s)/service(s), competitors, and the marketplace.

I call this getting real.

It plays out like this: If you are not real about your organization and the environment, then you are very likely to be unpleasantly surprised in the future.

Many of us have been witness to this kind of dangerous thinking in the business world. A few common examples:

  • “We don’t have any competitors.”
  • “Our customers love us.”
  • “ACME Company isn’t anything to worry about.”
  • “Every company needs our solution.”
  • “Our Widget is better than anything else out there.”

Successful growth leaders start their journey with deep introspection about the organization and the solutions they deliver to the market. After this growth assessment, they will also spend a lot of time out in the market gaining better Situational Awareness about the market(s) where they compete.

This level of honesty is the most important part of strategic planning. You have to put everything (good, bad, and ugly) on the table so that you can objectively evaluate it and plan around it.

Do not try to put lipstick on a pig…that generally only makes things worse.

Get real. If your product or service is crap, fix it. If you do not have the right team, make a change.

5 – Know Your Target (Market)

In addition to having clarity around long-term organizational goals, growth strategists also must strive to gain clarity around the target market for their solutions.

This often begins with market segmentation and analysis. Then, thinking deeply about where the organization can effectively compete and win.

These insights are often documented in the form of personas and an ideal client profile (ICP in growth parlance). Having consensus on this information is crucial in order for go-to-market teams to be able to do their jobs.

With personas and ICPs, marketing teams can define positioning and messaging, and develop appropriate lead generation campaigns. Sales teams can identify qualified prospects and know how best to close sales.

6 – Understand Your Buyer’s Journey

Knowing your target is not enough.

An equally important, and often overlooked, part of understanding your target market is to understand how prospects buy. This so-called “buyer’s journey” is the key to unlocking the puzzle of how to gain more sales, quicker.

Most go-to-market (GTM) organizations get this completely wrong.

Their mistake is to think that the prospects they have identified as ideal targets will fall into line and proceed stage-by-stage through the sales funnel that the sales organization has carefully designed. This is hardly ever how it happens in the wild.

Buyers are doing their own research, developing their own solutions, and working through internal approvals all outside of the view of sellers. In fact‚ Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers.

They are on their own buyer’s journey.

Smart sellers attempt to understand as much as possible about this journey, and then line up their sales process with the buyer’s buying process.

An important takeaway: Marketing enables sales. If you understand the buyer’s journey, you can then map the right marketing activities, educational content, and sales activities, to help coach and move the buyer along their buyer’s journey.

7 – Define Your Unique Selling Proposition

There are many ways to define value for a customer. However, one thing is true: If your prospect does not find value in what you are trying to sell them, they will not buy. Period.

In growth strategy, this is called a unique selling proposition (USP) – a clear statement that describes the benefit of your product or service, how you solve your customer’s needs and what distinguishes you from the competition.

Developing this can be a powerful sales tool. The absolute best sales superpower is to be unique. If there is no comparison, then you are free to compete on providing the best value for the client.

As one of my wise marketing mentors once shared with me, “an ounce of different is worth a pound of same.”

8 – Know Your Route(s) to Market

A crucial part of every growth plan is to know and understand your route(s) to market.

An organization can consider many different sales channels as part of their growth strategy. Selling directly into their target market(s), whether it is B2B or B2C, is the most common. Other channels include partners, wholesale, retail, OEM, etc.

Knowing your route to market is a fundamental requirement in order to define effective growth strategy.

In the earlier Buyer’s Journey commandment, I shared that marketing enables sales. Ensuring that marketing and sales are in alignment, and working in concert, is crucially important no matter what channel(s) you ultimately decide to use.

9 – Build a Scalable GTM Infrastructure

The ninth commandment is about building a solid foundation for growth.

We all know that you need a strong foundation in order to construct an enduring building. It is the same for organizations.

The GTM infrastructure for the organization includes people, process, technology, and data/analytics. Growth leaders must ensure the GTM infrastructure is both capable and scalable.

In the growth mix, technology can be a force multiplier if the core GTM tech stack (website, CRM, marketing automation, social media) are integrated. The goal of every growth leader is to make sure that marketing, sales, and client success are all working together effectively.

An added bonus to tech integration is that is allows us to measure everything. The ability to track and measure key metrics allows growth leaders to build a predictable revenue model, gain clarity on marketing ROI, and ultimately make intelligent decisions on how to optimize and grow the business.

10 – Develop a Balanced Marketing Plan

In order to grow the business, it is vital to have a balanced marketing plan. A consistent cadence of outbound and inbound tactics will help drive growth.

It is worth repeating this important concept: Marketing enables sales.

Marketing is an expense. For many organizations, it is one of the largest budget line items. However, with the proper metrics and accountability in place, it should also demonstrate enough ROI to justify the cost.

Unfortunately, marketing is often viewed as a one-time event. In order to drive consistent growth, you have to commit to an ongoing go-to-market process and a long-term plan. An intelligent balance of marketing tactics, consistently executed, is always the best path forward.

Avoid spreading your marketing efforts too thinly – if you are budget challenged it is much better to do fewer things, but do them well. You can invest more in marketing as your grow.

Go Forth and Conquer

Remember, there is no silver bullet for growth.

Growth leaders can dramatically improve their odds of success by embracing the wisdom of these 10 growth commandments and making sure the right team is in place. Some may find value in engaging a CMO to guide them on their journey.

-Onward

Get the Right People on the Bus First

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“It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive.” – James C. Collins

Early on in my career, I learned a valuable business lesson from my father when he shared this pearl of wisdom with me:

In life, almost every problem is ultimately a people problem.

If I am being honest, the true gravity and impact of that statement was largely lost on me at the time. Furthermore, I cannot even remember the event that triggered the conversation. However, over the years (and all my successive senior leadership roles across a number of organizations) the absolute brilliance of his advice became readily apparent.

All problems are ultimately people problems.

By extension, all solutions are also dependent on people.

Why? Because in any organization it takes people, working together, to solve the problems and come up with solutions that serve clients/customers/constituents.

Whether you call them your people, your team, your coworkers, your colleagues, your talent, or even your workforce…people are the key ingredient for success in any organization.

The Bus Analogy from Good to Great

One of my all-time favorite business strategy books is Good to Great, by Jim Collins, where the author and his team researched a number of organizations in an attempt to decipher the “growth DNA” of great companies.

They had expected to find that the first step in taking a company from good to great would be to set a new direction (defining a new vision and strategy for the company) and then getting the organization committed and aligned behind that new direction.

What they found was quite the opposite.

They discovered this common pattern: Those executives who ignited transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus (their metaphor for the organization) and then get people to take it there.

Instead, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it. These leaders essentially said, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”  

Three Simple Truths

Collins also found that these so-called “good-to-great leaders” understood three simple truths:

  1. If you begin with “who,” rather than “what,” you can more easily adapt to a changing world. If people join your organization primarily because of where it is going when they joined, what happens if you need to change direction? You then have a problem. However, if people are on the bus because of who else is on the bus, then it is much easier to change direction.
  2. When you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage them largely goes away.  The right people do not need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.
  3. Finally, if you have the wrong people, it simply does not matter whether you discover the right direction; you still will not have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant. In fact, as many of us have witnessed in our careers, the wrong people can be a cancer on the organization that will literally kill it from the inside out.

Connecting People to Your Strategic Plan

When starting out on their growth journey, many organizations unfortunately begin on the wrong foot.

It is a common trap for growth leaders to be so focused on the “what” that they neglect to think through the “who.” What do I mean by this?

In the world of growth strategy, execution begins with great leadership. Great leaders have the ability to attract, retain, and grow the talent needed to get the work done. They also instill a bias for action (MFGSD!)

Growing an organization, no matter the size or industry, is always a team sport. You will never reach your destination without the right team in place.

Expanding upon the “right people on the bus” analogy, here is my quick and dirty playbook for how you can connect people and your strategic plan for growth:

  1. It begins with a roadworthy bus. (Ensure your organization and product(s)/service(s) are ready to go to market. Do your values as an organization line up with the value you deliver to customers?)
  2. Make sure you have the right bus driver. (Does the leader of your organization have the experience, passion, and energy to lead the charge?)
  3. Next, get the right people on the bus. (This is your core leadership team.)
  4. Followed by getting the wrong ones off the bus. Quickly. (One of the most important, and difficult challenges for leaders is to take quick and decisive action on those who do not belong on the bus.)
  5. Next, make sure everyone is sitting in the right seat. (Do you have the right people in the right roles.)
  6. Now, as a team, you can think about your destination. (What is your envisioned future? What are your long-term objectives?)
  7. Followed by, plotting your ideal roadmap to get there, along with planning for any unexpected detours you might encounter along the way. (This is where you define your chosen strategy and create a robust plan.)
  8. Start driving! (Now it is time to get out of the building, and get dirty.)

Great People Achieve Great Results

Growth leaders embrace the concept that all problems are people problems, and all solutions require people.

The best leaders focus on building a great culture, one that attracts and retains the talent they need to execute their growth plans. They know that great people will achieve great results.

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.

-Onward

There is No Silver Bullet for Growth

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“There are no quick wins in business – it takes years to become an overnight success.” – Richard Branson

It is human nature to want a quick fix for every problem.

The proverbial “silver bullet” that will slay fearsome creatures with one shot.

The prospect tempts us every day:

  • Take this diet pill, and lose 5 pounds in a week…
  • Buy this stock, it is certain to double in the next quarter…
  • Execute this marketing tactic, and you will double your sales pipeline by the end of the year…

You get the idea. We all seek the easy solution. Oh, and, we want it to be painless too.

So, here is a news flash: It doesn’t exist.

Sorry.

There is no silver bullet.

The Conversation That Inspired This Article

I had a conversation with a good friend of mine last week. He was curious about my fractional Chief Marketing Officer services, and the focus on helping organizations grow. He wanted to know what the answer was…as if I had discovered “the” secret to growth and packaged it up for sale!

I explained to him the process I go through to help organizations unlock their growth potential.

It is a discovery and development process. It requires introspection. Honesty. Creativity. And, hard work.

It often involves asking difficult, sometimes uncomfortable, questions.

The “answer” to the growth question is not canned, but is as unique as each organization is.

Therein lies the rub.

Many leaders naively look for that secret marketing formula, or magical sales elixir that will fuel exponential growth for their business.

The reality is, in 99% of the cases, the big growth you see in an organization today is the result of a lot of hard work (the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears!) that took place over the course of many months or years.

What we are seeing is the compounding effect of multiple aligned actions, which taken together, over time, result in growth.

There is no silver bullet for growth.

Growth is Not Easy

Business innovation and growth are not easy.

It is easy to look at companies like Apple or Google and jealously think how easy they must have it. With their $Billions of market capitalization and a huge army of employees, they seem to effortlessly turn out a steady stream of great products and services which everybody wants.

The dirty secret is we are only seeing their successes. These are innovation-driven organizations that are constantly experimenting, testing, and refining new offerings. They invest huge sums of time and money into the effort, and have a well-developed playbook to bring them to market. Rarely do we see their failures because they have quietly killed them off and moved on.

Everyone wants the quick fix, but it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to be willing to put it all out there. I call it ‘the secret to being an overnight success,’ which means there really isn’t such a thing as an overnight success! The secret is you work really hard for 10 years, and then you become an overnight success. – Jon Gordon

True, there are those rare companies that get lucky and realize stratospheric, seemingly overnight, growth. Sadly, most of them do not survive in the long-term because they failed to build a solid foundation or invest in a sustainable business model.

There is no silver bullet for growth.

What to Do Next?

So what should you do if you are seeking growth for your organization?

First, make sure you really are ready for growth.

Next, take a disciplined and methodical approach to develop the best strategy for your organization from the ground up. A great place to start is by answering these six fundamental growth questions.

If you are feeling stuck, a fractional CMO can provide immediate assistance.

The harsh reality of the VUCA forces in our world is there are no silver bullets.

You need to be prepared. Have a plan. Execute (MFGSD) relentlessly. Expect the unexpected. Pivot quickly and adapt to changes. Keep on moving!

-Full speed ahead

How to Avoid the Efficiency Trap

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“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker

Many business leaders put in long hours and are always “busy” at work. However, this frenetic level of activity does not necessarily mean they are working on the right things.

How can this be?

In a turbulent and disrupted business environment like we find ourselves in today, it is very easy for time-starved executives to fall into “firefighting” mode – spending their days jumping from one urgent issue to the next. While it may be psychically rewarding to always feel needed, to cross off many to-do’s each day, and come home exhausted after a hard day at work…it is also a dangerous trap for leaders.  

I call it the efficiency trap.

Why is it a trap? Because if you are not careful about how you spend your time, it becomes very easy to spend all your time efficiently working on the wrong things. By their very nature, urgent items tend to beat out important ones, and consume all our valuable time in the process.

The key takeaway: Being efficient at addressing urgent but less important issues does not necessarily make you more effective in the long-term.

Use the Eisenhower Matrix to Direct Your Focus

In the world of time management and productivity improvement training there is an old framework credited to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The aptly named Eisenhower Matrix is a helpful management tool to help prioritize activities by considering their urgency and importance. It looks like this:

The logic behind it can be interpreted from various public speeches, where Eisenhower explained how he prioritized issues: “Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.” He went on to clarify, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Following this logic, many leaders incorrectly interpret the framework as prioritizing Urgent/Important. In effect prioritizing quadrant I (the green box in the graphic below) over all the others:

Unfortunately, this is exactly how most leaders spend their days. In crisis mode. Putting out fires. While they may be very efficient in solving immediate problems for their organizations, they may not be very effective in addressing long-term strategic challenges with what little time they have left.

As Stephen Covey went on to explain in his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book, we spend most of our time in quadrant I and III because they are “urgent” and thus steal our attention. We also tend to spend more time than we should in quadrant IV, because these are easy distractions and allow us to procrastinate hard things while appearing busy.

All of this activity effectively leaves no time for the most valuable and important quadrant of all, quadrant II.  Quadrant II is where we plan, reflect, strategize, are creative, nurture important relationships, and prepare for the future.

Effective leaders should spend most of their time in quadrant II:

Ironically, when leaders spent more of their time in quadrant II (the strategic planning frame) they can also anticipate and prevent many of the distracting quadrant I crises from occurring in the first place.

We Are Attracted to the Urgent

As humans, we are naturally attracted to bright shiny objects. These can take many forms. Sometimes they look like a neon billboard, a provocative advertisement, or an urgent crisis. In either case, it is interesting to note that science backs this up.

The Journal of Consumer Research recently conducted a study to examine how individuals decide what to work on when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance. The researchers discovered an interesting pattern: the test subjects paid more attention to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that were less urgent, even when the less urgent tasks offered greater rewards.

This quirk of human psychology – called the “Mere-Urgency Effect” – helps to explain why many leaders struggle with prioritizing their tasks. We have a natural inclination to prioritize tasks with an urgent deadline over tasks without any urgency regardless of the long-term payoffs or negative impact.

The Connection to VUCA Strategic Planning

We know that a strategic plan is useless unless leaders and their teams focus on execution. This bias to action is critical. By developing a robust VUCA Strategic Plan and following an effective Management Cycle cadence, leaders can stack the odds in their favor and help drive successful outcomes.

Sadly, many strategic plans fail. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most common is leadership distraction. By focusing on immediate urgent issues, they shift attention away from long-term strategic execution.

Does this mean the effort to produce the strategic plan was a waste of time? Not necessarily.

Since a well-thought-out strategic plan has articulated what is most important for the future of the organization and how to get there, it provides a great filter for leaders to evaluate how they should spend their time each day

The strategic plan ensures a focus on doing the right things. Being effective instead of just efficient.

Strategic Questions to Ask

So, how do we know if we are spending our time on the right things?

The place to begin is by examining the work you are doing, and the work of each of your team members across the organization. For each activity, ask questions around the value delivered, and if it has any impact on moving the organization forward. A few suggestions:

  • Why are we doing this activity?
  • Is it going to move us towards one (or more) of our strategic objectives?
  • Is this in line with our Mission, purpose, values?
  • Does this activity fit within our stated strategy and plan?
  • Are we neglecting quadrant II activities at the expense of more urgent, or less important activities?
  • Bonus questions: If it truly is a necessary activity? Could we do it more efficiently? Could it be outsourced?

Focus on Effectiveness

The next time you tell yourself “I was so productive today…” be sure to consider if you spent your time on the right things.

When it comes to strategy execution, effectiveness beats efficiency every time. It is much better to be 1% effective at doing the right thing than 100% efficient at doing the wrong thing! Over time, you can work on improving the speed of execution.

Effectiveness in doing the right activities will bring us closer to achieving our strategic objectives, and bring the organization closer to achieving its vision of success.

-Onward

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

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“Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.” – Benjamin Franklin

The saying “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” originated in the US Special Forces, but the fundamental principle behind it has been around for much longer, often shared with the expression “haste makes waste.”

The underlying principle is that it is more efficient to do things right the first time. When we rush into doing something, we run the risk of making mistakes and producing inferior results. An added benefit of being deliberate is that with enough practice you can actually become quicker and more efficient at doing the task.

This is an important concept for leaders in any organization. There is a fine line when strategic planning between taking decisive action, and moving too fast. As it turns out, there is great benefit to taking enough time to think about the challenge first. This allows time to assess the situation, develop a strategy, plan, think of different scenarios, and then take purposeful action.

A risk in moving too fast is you do not think things through. You miss clues. Opportunities pass you by. Risks hit you head on because you never anticipated them. Sloppy execution exposes you to a better-prepared competitor.

Military Origins

Special Forces operators carefully prepare for military operations. For example, US Navy SEALs train for missions slowly at first. They walk through the plan and rehearse responses to different possible scenarios. They rinse and repeat until they have a smooth cadence. They practice at slow speeds to build up their comfort level and “muscle memory”, which allows them to execute quickly in combat.

When you consider that modern infantry combat centers around mobility, there is a lot of logic to this approach – there are four typical scenarios in urban combat:

  • Don’t move – you risk getting pinned down and surrounded.
  • Move too fast – risk of being exposed to enemy fire with no cover.
  • Move too slow – risk of being outflanked.
  • Move too hastily – risk of losing situational awareness and running into a trap.

Movement is very important. Clearly, nothing good happens if you are not moving. However, you cannot move too quickly or slowly, you must move with purpose. Of course, there are situations where moving fast is necessary and potentially lifesaving for soldiers – the goal is to move as quickly and perfectly as possible. This is where preparation, practice, and leadership comes in.

For military operators this is a critical way to prepare for difficult challenges, and ensure successful outcomes. With this diligent preparation behind them, they can then perform the operation quickly and efficiently out in the field.

This approach applies equally well to the world of work.

In the World of Work

We live in unprecedented times of unpredictability and disruption. This VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment can sometimes make it challenging to know what to do next.

Many business leaders fall victim to the dangerous assumption that the only way to win in this environment is by running full speed ahead at all times. This popular myth has been glorified by business media, and is magnified by our 24/7, always on, society.

Pick any field, and at the highest levels of achievement and performance, you will find professionals who have trained extensively using this principle to prepare. For example, even when they are moving incredibly fast, elite athletes do not look rushed – they appear relaxed, with purposeful but fluid movements. What we do not see without the benefit of slow motion and expert analysis is that their movements have been finely tuned and optimized through a lot of repetitions, hard work and coaching.

The same observation applies to professionals in any field you can think of – surgeons, master electricians, enterprise sales reps, marketing executives…they all reach the pinnacle of achievement through hard work, deliberate practice, and never rushing. They have a strategy, develop a plan, and then execute. Over time, they perfect their craft and become quicker and more efficient.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

A Sailing Example

When the skipper of a sailboat wants to change directions, it is called tacking the boat. During a race, this critical and carefully timed maneuver can cause the boat to gain or lose position depending on how well it is executed by the crew. There are many variables to consider, including boat speed, wind speed and direction, waves, crew, and proximity to other boats. If you turn too quickly, you shave off speed; turn too slowly and you lose momentum. The goal is a slow but steady, smooth turn with the wind catching the sail at the perfect moment and accelerating the boat out of the turn in the new direction.

Tacking is a skill practiced constantly by sailboat racing crews, and speed is the reward. They know races are often won or lost by a few seconds, and executing this crucial maneuver smoothly and quickly is a critical factor to winning.

Too Slow Can Be Fatal

While slow is smooth, too slow can be fatal.

Leaders must strike a delicate balance between being thoughtful and taking action. The downside to taking a slow approach is that in some organizations it can devolve to “paralysis by analysis.” Teams end up spending so much time thinking and planning that they lose momentum and opportunity passes them by.

A difficult part of leadership is properly designing the solution, but also instilling a sense of urgency to get it done. In this context, urgency does not mean being frantic or that it must be done immediately. Urgency means having a bias for action, but also doing it well.

Movement is the underlying force behind the “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” philosophy – movement that is thoughtful, with a purpose and proper planning, but also deliberate and unrelenting.

Conclusion

A hurried soldier makes a careless mistake and puts their life in harm’s way, an unprepared athlete loses a game against an inferior opponent, and a hard charging executive makes an ill-considered decision. While the stakes are different, the solution to preparing for each situation is the same.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

-Onward