From the Book

Here’s the truth:

You can succeed against clever new startups and beat them at their own game.

You can disrupt from within and generate meaningful growth, and you can do thatforever by building your own incubator and accelerator, your own Growth Engine.

You have advantages that new startups can never hope to match — as long as you don’t get in your own way and fail to leverage those advantages. You have ideas,talent, capital, brand technology, channels, and best of all, you have customers,often millions of them.

What Will You Get Out of Reading This Book?

We will include insights and activities related to the full spectrum ofventure creation, including:

Ideate. Generating, prioritizing, and winnowing out good ideas for potential ventures.

Incubate. Finding customer pain, developing product or service solutions to solvethat pain, and exploring business models able to generate significant growth(viable ventures with prepared teams and actionable business and operating plans).

Accelerate. Launching new enterprises with a series of pilots and small bets to reducerisk, find ultimate product-market fit, and generate revenue (scalable businesses).

Scale. Seizing the Mothership Advantage to ensure the ventures can reach escapevelocity and outrun their startup or peer company competitors. Leveraging theMothership’s assets and overcoming its inertia will ensure your ventures can beateven the most well-funded startups.

Selecting a Great New Venture Team

No two teams will ever look the same, and there is no one recipe for success as youchoose your teams. What matters is that the members of your venture team representa range of superpowers. Diversity in every manifestation of that word — whether howpeople present, how they think, how they learn and process information, where theycome from, their range of experiences, their education (or lack thereof sometimes), theirnetworks — will make your venture better. The worst possible team is one whereeveryone looks, sounds, and thinks the same; good luck understanding the myriad customers you want to attract if everyone falls into a single category. The two thingsthat really need to be consistent are that every person can handle being anentrepreneur — the lifestyle is not for everyone — and that they have a growth mindsetand will listen to customers, colleagues, and sponsors. Teams with toxic team membersare doomed.

To truly institutionalize growth — and put us out of a job — everycompany can and should build and run its own Venture Factory.

Building a Venture Factory ensures that the Mothership doesn’t just launch one new ventureone time, but has the platform, people, methodology, and tools in place to create a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures to drive growth in perpetuity.

Big companies have the ability within their power to tackle the big,complex challenges we face on this planet.

If we fall into the trap of finding the challenges too overwhelming, we risk doing nothing.If we think “that’s not our job,” that its government’s task to fix that problem, and that wepersonally are helpless, we are wrong, and deeply so. Each and every one of us has withinus the capacity to drive profound change.

New ventures can be bold. They are a way to place the small bets we need to test solutions.They can move with speed and agility and, when managed right, are unbounded by the statusquo. Even if your new idea isn’t destined to solve anything so grand, the way you go aboutbuilding your venture can do good in and of itself. You, your Venture Factory, and your venturescan be role models in the way you hire, use resources, treat people, interact with partners,engage with the environment, accept differences, respect human rights, and play for the longterm, not just the quarter.

You can do well by doing good and you can have fun along the way, whether you are in theC-suite leading the way or the entrepreneur making it happen. Each and every one of us candrive positive, sustainable, meaningful growth for ourselves, our customers,our companies, andyes, absolutely, our planet.

The time to start is now.
The moment is here.
Build your Venture Factory.
Do great things.
Unleash the Unicorn within!