I have been searching for an answer to the question, “How must we build and manage a ‘good’ company?” for 20 years. My lessons from rolling up my sleeves and doing the gritty work at dozens of companies helped me develop my method to architect [what I call] holistic companies. My method is The Spiral Stairway: The System To Build A Holistic Company.
The Problem Statement: Every company has incongruence between its purpose, strategy, and operations. Incongruence is like friction; it causes value delivery challenges, capital inefficiency, and unsustainability of outcomes. Incongruence also evolves with time, scale, and environment. Thus, addressing incongruence is not a one-time recalibration.
The Solution: Develop a system to intentionally minimize incongruence between who-to-serve, what-to-offer, and how-to-deliver in a manner that balances the incentives of customers, investors, employees, partners, and society. An effective company-wide system enables periodic macro-evolutions and ongoing micro-evolutions to recalibrate the company over time, scale, and environmental shifts.
The Result: Friction will never be zero. We can only minimize it. Minimizing incongruence across a company maximizes net positive value creation, capital efficiency, and sustainability of outcomes. Sustainable revenue growth and profitability follow. The converse is equally valid.
In summary, embracing system thinking to enable strong fundamentals and choosing intentional company-level evolution will reap dividends across customer value creation, investor outcomes, board and employee alignment, sustainable revenue growth, and profitability for years to come.