Donald Laurie

Leadership Innovator, Growth Strategist, and Business Builder

BIG IDEAS

• Leadership and Adaptive Challenges
  Leaders need to differentiate between technical problems which they know how to solve and adaptive challenges where there are no easy answers and the issues often embody problems related to behavior, deeply held beliefs, and culture. Too often, executives and managers use terms such as leadership, power, and authority interchangeably. Donald draws a clear distinction between Authority (power to deliver services) and Leadership (mobilizing resources to accomplish a mission). He provides a set of principles leaders at all levels of the organization can operate when they encounter adaptive challenges:
  
  • Get in the coaches box high above the playing field – identifying strategic, operating, and behavior patterns that are opportunities or barriers to success
  • Frame the adaptive challenge
  • Regulate distress
  • Give the work to the people who need to execute and change
  • Hold the group in their work
  • Identify and challenge work avoidance techniques
  • Listen to leaders on the front line and deep within the organization
  
  Donald helps leaders develop their leadership agendas and focus their time commitments on priorities where they are needed by the organization and/or groups they lead.
• Creating New Growth Platforms
  Sooner or later, in today's fast paced global economy, even companies who experienced high growth rate year after year will experience a slow down. And while growth rates slow down, expectations of the boards and CEO's of these organizations remain high.
  
  So where does next generation real growth come from? In this presentation, Donald Laurie shows how new growth platforms can reignite growth, by enabling companies to build families of products and services and extend their capabilities into multiple new domains. These platforms, however, often require fundamentally different technologies, managerial approaches, and assumptions about how to make money.
  
  Developing and executing new growth platforms requires management to challenge the status quo strategies, culture, and management system. Beyond new strategies and business models, large global businesses must be clear about the problem(s) they are trying to solve. This process requires leaders to:
  
  • Know your platform logic: Define what is unique, valuable and portable.
  • Identify the critical tasks to build the platform.
  • Target policies, procedures and organization structures that need to be adapted or changed.
  • Assemble a team with skills, talent and capabilities required to execute the plan. Remember the team is more important than the idea.
  • Determine areas of the culture that need to be preserved and abandoned to execute the platform-building plan with speed and efficiency. Often this requires new leadership behavior.
  
  In addition to focusing on how success is achieved in platform building, Donald discusses when innovation fails in terms of conflicts with core business ‘way of working,’ opposition from key executives, failure to sustain commitment and unwitting overconfidence.
  
  Donald goes to the heart of how to create and execute new growth platforms when many other approaches have been tried and failed.
• Five Reasons that Growth Initiatives in Big Companies Succeed
  Every public company has a growth gap. CEOs sponsor growth initiatives to address the problem but an astonishing percentage of these fail for reasons including the difficulty in developing the right culture, mindset, experience, capabilities, and incentives. Developing fast-growth initiatives at the same time you run an existing operation is a formidable challenge.
  
  This presentation will highlight actions and behaviors by executives that lead successful grow initiatives, including:
  
  • Assembling a team with the right capabilities. They understand the team is more important than the product or business idea.
  • Putting a grown-up in charge. They appoint an accomplished General Manager who is credible and understands what’s going to be needed as the start-up develops.
  • Providing the right kind of oversight. The successful oversight leader shows commitment, collaboration, and clout.
  • Assessing performance in a useful way. Performance criteria for a new growth initiative will be fundamentally different than an ongoing operation.
  • Knowing how to fund a start-up. They divorce funding from the budget cycles, ring fence funding that runs on different rules than the rest of the company. Often they appoint a Chief Growth Officer and allocate funds beyond the annual budget. Always they dole out the money when (and only when) a milestone is reached.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Donald Laurie is recognized throughout the world for his work on leadership and growth issues. His talks provide an engaging and insightful look at the work of leadership in managing adaptive challenges–issues for which there are no easy answers. He co-authored the Harvard Business Review classic, “The Work of Leadership” which is the best-selling reprint on leadership in the history of HBR. The leadership principles in the article have helped executives, organizations and industries transform how they operate and better meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Donald has worked with both corporate clients as well as the military in creating sustainable leadership programs.

“Creating New Growth Platforms,” also published in HBR, provided executives and managers in large global and start-up companies with a disciplined and systematic approach to re-conceive their growth strategies and focus on building new growth platforms, rather than (less value creating) individual products. Creating multiple products, services, applications and businesses has created top line growth and shareholder value in mature industries and high-growth domains including mobile communications, information technology, healthcare, consumer and others.

Donald is Chief Executive of Oyster International LLC.  He works with chief executives and senior management in developing and executing their leadership agendas in corporate .  He is a frequent speaker at corporate management conferences, CEO summits, BusinessWeek roundtables and such high-profile venues as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He led the Harvard Business School, INSEAD and Oyster International research: The CEO Agenda and Growth and is the author of two books, The Real Work of Leaders and Venture Catalyst:  The Five Strategies of Explosive Corporate Growth.

He is an investor, business builder and director of a number of early and mid-stage companies including:  Up-to-Date, Endeca Technologies, TEI Bioscience, Lazarus Effect, Transenterix and Semprus Bioscience.

He is on the Board of Trustees of St. Benedict’s Prep and an active contributor to the work of the Institute for Health Care Improvement.  He is on the selection committee for the USNA and HBR Ethical Leadership Award presented annually at the Leadership Excellence Summit at the United States Naval Academy.