Viele der im Buch besprochenen Thesen habe ich in der Realität wiedergefunden. Die zentralen Aussagen habe ich daher zusammengefasst.
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Thousands of companies this year approach a dangerous transition through No Man's Land - when they are too big to be considered small but still too small to be considered big. And the vast majority of these emerging growth companies, both private and public, crash and burn before they reach the other side.
"My gosh, it's like a no man's land. You can't survive there. You've got to push through to the other side or go back to start." = > Entscheidungspunkt für eine rapid growth company: entweder weiter wachsen, zurückfallen auf alte Größe oder sterben. Meist um die 20-100 MA.
Signs of No Mans Land:
- although business was once booming, momentum is slowing
- the firm lacks a sense of how it is making money and what its future profitability picture will look like
- you just can't get the people in your company to support you as you make the commitments required to meet customer needs
- business decisions become increasingly complex and beyond the capacity of existing leadership to handle intuitively (you know it, but you don't know what the exact problem is)
- the firms leadership feels stuck and stagnant
- reporting systems no longer provide meaningful information
- some of your key employees are exhausted and unhappy
- the old rules no longer seem to work
- you feel like the business is too big to be small and too small to be big
The four Ms: Market, Management, economic Model, attracting Money
At a certain size, the physical demands become so intense that the entrepreneur can no longer deliver un an individual basis the value he once did. => misalignment with customers and market => fundamental peril!
It's one thing to be aligned, quite another to stay aligned. (..) Leaders of successful start-ups are able to deliver precisely because they are attuned to even minuscule changes in the needs of their customers.
You as a business leader must step away from day-to-day operations and honestly evaluate yourself and your company.
The growth that leads a company into No Mans Land will not lead a company out of it.
A firm that has passed through No Mans Land has achieved some measure of stability. The firms survival is no longer in jeopardy.
Make one set of promises to customers, and the firm will evolve in a certain direction. Make another set, and the firm will look very different over time. (..) The correct promises will keep you growing through No Mans Land, while the wrong ones will kill you.
As entrepreneurs struggle with the firm's identity, they tend to curl up and become internally confused.
What exactly is this company about? What differentiates the company from competitors in customers minds?
Developing processes that replicate the entrepreneur's talents becomes a huge part of a company's competitive advantage.
It is ethical, legal moral, and, in many cases, good business to stay small, make money, and enjoy the fruits of your personal talents and passions. Some businesses will be profitable only as small operations framed around the entrepreneur.
It is quite possible for a firm to blossom after No Mans Land, while its founders find themselves stressed-out and miserable.
Since a small business is based on your personal efforts, its value is limited, since it almost certainly will not survive without you.
Delegating to senior management is the only way to gain back control.
In transitioning through growth, most firms simply don't have the additional leadership experience they need.
You'll need some people by your side who have already done it, and who have proven that they know what they are doing.
Rapid-growth firms need people who have worked with larger organizations and know what the firm will look like at larger scale.
Letting go of longtime employees is pure agony. We're talking about firing lifelong friends, people who followed you into business when nobody else did. Some, or even many, of these people just won't make it to the next level. They don't have the skills the firm needs to move ahead, and, as the entrepreneur, you know it. Once you can't make the successful, it's time for them to go. I do strongly believe that the founder needs to change the organization's gene pool by bringing in senior leaders to help him. How many members of your senior management team have had experience in a senior management position with a company that had at least five times your current revenue?
An unsuccessful business deserves a new decision process (i.e. a new culture).
Most entrepreneurs attract their first customers by running their businesses according to a "high-performance, cheap labor" economic model. As the firm scales upward, this economic model breaks down.
Distribution channels - the mechanism used by a firm to identify and acquire a new customer - are by far the most expensive component of the business model.
To push through No Mans Land, firms must find ways to generate positive motion once again.
The point is simply to prove that your company has mojo and can still solve a problem.
Gazelles typically don't understand who the ultimate customer is while developing and launching a product. They improvise as they go, making opportunistic promises to customers that in turn change the product and the company. Their business is living laboratory, a process of discovering what ultimately is the right product, service, and target customer.
In the corporate world, most managers are rewarded and measured accoding to revenues and earnings they drive. Among gazelles, by contrast, management is rewarded and measured on the basis of value created, without this value in the former early stages being expressed directly in revenue or profit.
The leadership is instinctively oriented around the development of value through innovation, not the ultimate value of economic leverage (i.e. drinving earnings through process efficiencies at large-volume revenues) .
Economic leverage ultimately has to be introduced into the equation, but usually after certain elements of value have been created and the business and its target customers are defined.
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No Man's Land von Doug Tatum
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