A few years ago, when I worked myself out of my CEO job and moved into growth consulting, I had one idea I kept coming back to: organizations aren’t inanimate objects. They’re more like living organisms.
Here’s what I mean. The businesses we lead and the ideas we have are changing day in and day out, as people come in and out of them, and as the people inside them change and grow. And the businesses we lead are subject to their environment the way an organism is. Winter looks really different from spring for most of the organisms living around us, and they do different things in different seasons. Sometimes hard weather comes through and wrecks the ecosystem.
That happens to businesses. Look at COVID. Look at what’s happening in the economy right now in certain industries, and how volatile it can feel. You can have an amazing product, great marketing, great people, great sales, every facet of growing something, and if you’re operating in an environment that isn’t conducive to growth, you probably aren’t going to grow. It doesn’t matter how good you are.
That idea is why I started Green Thumb Consulting: treating organizations like living organisms, and trying to have a green thumb for helping them reach their potential.
A while back a newer client named Brad walked into my office and recommended a book called Permaculture. It’s the playbook he used to build actual ecosystems in Central America for decades. It’s dense. But there are so many synergies between what people have learned building ecosystems, especially building them sustainably, where the goal isn’t continual investment but investing your time, money, hours, and energy in a way that helps the thing become more, growing in a safe, self-sustaining, healthy way.
There are a lot of lessons in there for people leading organizations. The one I see most, in myself and in the owner-operators I work with, is the tendency to diagnose the wrong problem because we didn’t take enough time to observe.
You don’t fix a product problem the same way you fix a marketing problem or a sales problem or a team problem. You don’t even fix team problems the same way every time. Sometimes it’s a clarity problem coming from leadership. Sometimes a person just isn’t in a healthy place and needs to be out, and people try to fix it the wrong way by working harder on culture or communication.
If we as owners and operators could do one thing, I think it’s develop a green thumb for our organizations. Because these living organisms don’t get healthy once and then take off and grow on their own forever. People change. Organizations change. Seasons change. So we put daily time, energy, and attention into taking care of this thing called a business.
That’s the work I’m doing now: helping organizations get a clear sense of their potential and how to reach it, and walking alongside them as they grow. And I’m going to keep sharing what I’m seeing and learning, because I’m curious what other people are learning about scaling things, and because across leading, launching products, and working with companies in all kinds of industries, there are lessons I find fascinating and think we need for how we put our time and energy into the organizations we lead.
If you want a green thumb for your business, follow along. I want to build a collection, and a conversation, around what it looks like to be green thumbs for the organizations we lead.
— Craig