Fast Growth: Innovate to Accelerate

You, your team, or your company needs to grow fast. 

The key to dizzying growth? Innovation. Keys to unlocking innovation? The S Curve and blitzscaling. 

Blitzscaling is speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty. Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman define it in their book Blitzscaling as a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth. An accelerated path to the stage in a startup's life cycle creating the most value. 

To understand the process of blitzscaling, you look no further than our friend, the S Curve. I talked with Chris Yeh on the Disrupt Yourself podcast about blitzscaling, the S Curve of scaling, and the similarities to the S Curve of Learning™. 

For a company, a product, or a new project, the bottom of the S Curve is defined by classic startup growth. The company is trying to figure out the product-market fit and seeks to be efficient when things are uncertain (launch point). 

On the steep part of the S Curve, a company seeks to achieve dominance ahead of the competition, sacrificing efficiency for speed, even in the face of uncertainty. It's terrifying, but the company is a rocket ship (sweet spot) if it's working well. 

As you approach the top of the curve, certainty increases, but you still sacrifice efficiency for growth. On the top of the curve, you experience classic scale-up growth focused on efficiency, relative confidence (mastery). 

This process is most often found in startups as they have the freedom, culture and lack the typical controls of a larger organization. But it doesn't have to be limited to startups—the single major factor that some companies blitzscale and others don't: Innovation. 

When presented with new technology, idea, or product, most people's first instinct is to take an existing business model and translate it to a new platform. For example, when the Internet came about, people sought to translate a newspaper to an online newspaper in the same format. But simply translating a business model from one medium to another doesn't necessarily work. 

It's the same for individuals, teams, or new products. Putting new ideas into old frameworks can lead to failure. 

Just like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and other companies that harnessed new ideas, technologies, and strategies to achieve growth in record time, you need to innovate. And innovation is at the heart of the first of the 7 Accelerants of Growth™, Take the Right Risks. 

Taking the Right Risks means taking market risk (playing where others are not) rather than competitive risk (going directly after the competition). Growth is more likely to accelerate in an open or nearly-open field. 

Once you identify the gap or create a new market, rapid growth requires you to rethink your role and how you show up in the world. While our instinct might be to say, "How can I fit the way I currently operate into this new role?" Instead, to rapidly scale, you must ask yourself, "What is the true way this is going to work?" To gain that insight, you will have to apply most if not all of the 7 Accelerants of Growth™. 

As you go through that process, determine how you can capitalize on your distinctive strengths to meet the needs of the new market and new role. Just as the most successful business models are things that never existed before, the most successful individual innovators act and operate in a way that fits the need of the new environment. 

Consider your current S Curve of Learning. Ask yourself, "am I willing to blitzscale?" If you're not ready or not able to, start by going faster in one or two areas. Experiment. Iterate. And be discovery-driven to innovate and start going a little faster than feels comfortable. 

How can you leverage the Seven-Point Framework of Personal Disruption™ to accelerate your growth, to blitzscale?

What does it look like to sacrifice efficiency for speed on your own S Curve? 

How can you leverage innovation to grow rapidly?