Rapid Growth, Done Right summary

Imagine that you’ve just wandered into a corporate HQ. You pass through the foyer and ride the elevator up to the design department, where creatives are chewing over their latest ideas. Then you head to the tech division, where you eavesdrop on the coders and computer geniuses who are busy turning the creatives’ ideas into workable products. Finally, you climb up to the finance department, where business minds are making sure everything adds up. 

Listening in on each department, you might think that they were speaking three different languages. Each department seems like a separate planet – and that’s a problem. For a modern business to really grow, its different components must work together symbiotically. Ideas from creatives should inform the business side, and vice versa. Your job as a leader is to facilitate this. 

The key message here is: Successful growth leaders create symbiotic relationships among creative, technical, and business minds.

A great business will unite all of these different talents seamlessly. If it can’t, it isn’t likely to succeed. For instance, if creatives dominate the conversation, their ideas might not turn out to be profitable. If only business minds have free reign, they may stifle creativity, and groundbreaking ideas that can spur exponential growth might not see the light of day. 

That means leaders need to become trilingual and help build a relationship among creative, technical, and business minds. Take someone like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Though his personal strength is his sharp business mind, he was able to speak fluently to the technical and creative parts of the business. 

To be like Bezos, there are some key behaviors that you need to adopt. First, you need to become a questioner. It might sound obvious, but continuous questioning is vital if you want to understand things not in your immediate area of expertise.

Second, you need to have empathy. To really understand people with different skill sets and perspectives, you need to get inside their minds. You can still be authentic and maintain your personal vision, but as a leader, you have to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes. By learning to empathize with them fully, you’ll really learn their language.

Last, you need to be able to translate context. This means being able to explain concepts and ideas to different people in a way that relates to them. For example, you might need to explain why a business objective matters to the graphics department. If you want to get all areas of the business working together harmoniously, this is a vital skill.