Wed, May 1, 2013 — Quantum Growth Somehow, and with no help from my Zeta Psi fraternity brothers, I managed to graduate with an engineering degree from U.C. Berkeley. But there was a point when it wasn’t clear I was going to make it. One reason was a challenging but fascinating course on Quantum Mechanics. The fact that an electron, with the right amount of energy, just “shows up” in a new orbit around a nucleus, completely boggled my mind. This indeed is the notion of a “quantum leap”. Now years later in our business of helping CEOs realize their growth visions, I’ve witnessed a parallel phenomenon: Taking Your Company to the Next Level Requires Enough Energy to Cause a State Change Yesterday I was interviewing Larry Bloomquist, CEO of Mechanical Reps Incorporated (MRI) for a future blog article on his experience with “The 4 Disciplines of Execution”. As a result of implementing the concepts of this book, which has required a significant commitment on the part of his leadership and their core teams, MRI is now producing at a whole new level. What was different? While the details of Larry’s experience is fodder for a future article, his fanatical adaptation of the book’s guidelines for creating wildly important goals and managing progress with scorecards produced what I’ll call a “quantum change” – meaning, they didn’t just experience some incremental improvements, but a relatively dramatic step up in performance. In our practice of helping mid-sized companies reach their next levels of growth, we’re regularly seeking similar results. Incremental growth is not interesting. Not to the CEO, not to investors or to the board. In fact, a timid approach to growth – simply trying to make things a little bit better, a little more efficient – may be a formula for disaster. Like not challenging your muscles in a workout, not challenging your organization to push, to drive to achieve a new level could result in the loss of “muscle” and the ability even to perform at existing levels.
