Everyone Has a Growth Strategy. Few Know Where Growth Will Come From
This is part of a series based on my conversation with Jesper Isaksen, Partner and Head of Talent at FSN Capital.
Every company I have worked with, led, or observed from the boardroom had a growth strategy. The ambition was never missing.
The real challenge starts when you look beneath the headline: Where exactly will the growth come from? Why do we believe those opportunities exist? What gives us the right to compete and win in those markets? And do we have the knowledge, capabilities, and insights in the room to answer these questions honestly?
Growth aspirations are easy to define. A compelling growth strategy requires a deep understanding of markets, customers, competitive advantage, and the assumptions behind the choices we make.
What I find valuable about the conversation I had recently with Jesper Isaksen from FSN Capital is how directly he addressed this. The approach he described is not about bringing in large consulting firms to define the direction from the outside. It is about helping the management team understand the opportunities by themselves, working from their own data, their own customer interactions, and their own knowledge of where competitors are moving. That distinction matters more than it might seem on the surface. A strategy that the management team has genuinely internalized is a fundamentally different thing from a strategy that was handed to them in a presentation.
The question that follows is how to allocate resources once the priorities are clear. And here the logic is straightforward but often poorly executed in practice. You identify the few critical strategic priorities where you want to accelerate, and you align the organization around those. That might mean existing products in new geographies, or adjacent products in markets you already serve well. Whatever the direction, the capital allocation has to follow the strategy in a visible and deliberate way. A strategy that is not backed by where you actually put the money remains on paper. I have seen this more times than I can count, and it is one of the more frustrating patterns to observe from a board seat, because the discussion about growth sounds right, but nothing in the resource allocation reflects it.
The other side of that discipline is simplification. Companies that have been operating for many years accumulate layers that no longer serve the current direction. Processes that made sense at an earlier stage of development, reporting lines that reflect old structures, initiatives that were never formally stopped. Jesper's point, which resonates very much with my own experience, is that trimming and simplifying those layers is not about cost-cutting as an end in itself. It is about making the organization coherent enough to actually move. When everyone understands the purpose, the plan, and the direction, and when there is a clear logic of where the company is reducing and where it is accelerating, the organization gains a kind of clarity that is very difficult to manufacture through communication alone. It has to be visible in the structure and in the decisions.
The question I raised in that conversation was whether this level of discipline and focused process can work in very large companies, the twenty, thirty, or fifty-billion-euro businesses that operate across many markets, many business models, and sometimes multiple sectors. The conglomerate model has largely disappeared since the 1980s and 1990s, so most large companies are more focused than they once were, but the complexity is still significant. What I have come to believe, after 38 years of working in and around large organizations, is that the most successful ones maintained a decentralized philosophy even as they grew. They understood that customers and people are situated in specific geographies, with specific dynamics, and that the people closest to those realities need the space to use their entrepreneurial and innovation capabilities. The ones that tried to centralize everything, to make every unit look and operate identically, tended to lose exactly the capabilities that made their individual parts valuable.
What makes the disciplined, process-driven approach work at scale is not uniformity. It is the ability to see performance clearly and quickly, at every level of the organization, and then to have an honest conversation about what the numbers mean and what needs to change. Jesper described working previously at a large American industrial conglomerate where the same governance and process framework was applied across three continents and three different sectors, and it worked because the structure created clarity rather than imposing sameness. You could walk into any board conversation and understand within seconds how the business was performing and where the pressure points were. The discussion could then focus on what to do about it rather than on decoding what was actually happening. That is a different quality of governance, and it is achievable in large companies, but it requires a consistency of philosophy and management over time that is not easy to sustain through repeated reorganizations and leadership changes.
Rada Rodriguez