Except for some early actions to enable business building, the organization’s work in micro-battles is largely “vertical”-serving customers, mobilizing the front line and battling competitors.
Stage 4: Refining your core repeatable model and operating model. To scale the micro-battles program itself and ensure a broader impact, the executive team also starts to cascade initiatives throughout the organization with a new group of Amplify teams.
#DEFINE INSURGENCY HOW TO#
The leadership team identifies people who excel at scaling prototypes into Repeatable Models®, assigns them to each micro-battle team and helps them build a community to share best practices (for more on scalers, see our blog posts “ How to Identify Great Scalers” and “ The Best Practices of Great Scalers”). As micro-battle teams achieve success and the number of initiatives grows, it’s important to address the challenges of scaling innovations into new businesses. Stage 3: Scaling your scaling capability. In doing so, they support and accelerate business building. The executive leadership team, also known as the Amplify team, transforms its skills and behaviors by supporting and accelerating wins from micro-battles. We call this process the “Win-Scale” cycle (for more on Win-Scale, see our guide, “ The Bain Micro-battles System”).
Micro-battles require small teams to continuously generate prototypes, with the ultimate goal of creating a repeatable model that serves the entire company. The leadership team launches the first set of micro-battles and learns the critical skills of business building. They are supported by the core repeatable model of your business. Micro-battles require organizations to hone the necessary skills of business building: leading, learning and scaling (for more on business building, see our blog post “ Micro-battles and Building New Businesses”). They agree to start the journey via micro-battles. They acknowledge the need to master the art of business building. The leadership team understands the necessity and benefits of competing on the basis of scale and speed (for more on scale insurgency, see our book The Founder’s Mentality ). In doing so, we guide the journey through four key stages (see Figure 1). We’ve worked with dozens of companies on more than 500 micro-battles globally.
They help your people relearn the art of business building, the key skill of all great scale insurgents. In order to restore a Founder’s Mentality and become a scale insurgent, companies can fight “ micro-battles.” These small, cross-functional initiatives create microcosms of the organization you want to become. The goal of this journey is to shift the corporate agenda and transform your behaviors. It’s been a while since your agenda was dominated by customers and the frontline heroes that serve them. You no longer know which of these updates link to your company mission. We’re guessing that your leadership team meetings are dominated by endless PowerPoint updates that boast how busy everyone is with functional excellence programs. Based on our experiences, we’ve codified a 10-step journey to help companies get started on the path to scale insurgency. With a Founder’s Mentality®, insurgents and incumbents alike can avoid inevitable sluggishness, instead transforming into powerful “scale insurgents”-those rare companies that win with their speed and their size. We’ve found that organizations can achieve sustainable, profitable growth by rediscovering those motivating attitudes and behaviors that can usually be traced back to a bold, ambitious founder.
Since then, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies on how to fight the crises of growth. The growth paradox has been at the heart of our work, going back to our book The Founder’s Mentality, which was published in 2016. It isn’t that these larger, seasoned companies don’t have ideas-they just find it so difficult to get new innovations into the market quickly and at scale. Their size has created mountains of complexity, making them vulnerable to all those pesky insurgent companies nipping at their toes. It should also worry the CEOs of great incumbents, who stand proudly as industry leaders. Their hypergrowth, which is the envy of slower, older competitors, is creating hypercomplexity. It should terrify the founders of young insurgent companies. This paradox causes great firms to rise and fall. Growth creates complexity, but complexity kills growth.