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I’m really big on this notion of creating a growth board as a way of vetting ideas, and funding ideas and green-lighting ideas in any organization. One thing I learned a little late in my career, and in the company I worked for, was that culture is everything. We all know culture is really important, but you need the whole culture to feel that they’re part of invention and reinvention and change. That means you’re giving people permission to test things and to learn. I believe everybody needs to be a part of this lab of change, and growth board is a very formalized process of doing it.
You’re basically creating a team that’s like an in-house venture capital team. You’re giving them a certain amount of money or funding, and it could just be simply a portion of your budget that you already have. I’m not suggesting you have to go find the money—you probably have it. Maybe it’s just time, or access to a team of people who are going to help you get something done. And you’re constantly, on a regular basis, bringing together people from different teams in the company and you’re evaluating new ideas against the strategy of the company. You’re constantly deciding: should we fund this idea to the next stage? Everybody’s doing it together, and you’re saying, let’s test this idea. Okay, we know it’s a good idea because we reduced time off of this process, we saved money, the customer wants it. Okay, should we be doing this in a bigger way? Yes. We’re going to put a dedicated team to do it. Really what you’re doing is going from a seed stage to a launch stage to a growth stage.
The other thing I’ve learned out of this process is that there are some people in your organization who are really good at seeding ideas, at testing things. They don’t need to run a big P&L, they just want to be the ones who seed the ideas. And then there are people who are really good at keeping it going. The idea’s been tested and they’re really good at the more operational element. What this does is allow different people in the organization to have a much better role that suits them. So not only are you funding ideas, you’re allowing people the space to be good at the part of idea generation or idea development that suits them best.