NOTE: Because there is considerable overlap between this course (SSV, #1789) and the spring course Strategy Execution, #1312, it is recommended that students not take both of them.

Course Format: Spring Q3Q4. Students will meet once a week for a 120-minute session and will discuss cases, interact with guests, and/or actively apply tools.

This course is for founders, joiners, investors, and consultants aspiring to create value by designing (or helping design) the management systems necessary to bring new ventures from early-stage startups to growth-stage and beyond. Early-stage ventures initially (and naturally) rely on informal interactions to develop their offers, connect with customers and investors, and launch operations. Upon entering the growth stage, scaling ventures introduce, often of necessity, increasingly formal management systems to recruit, organize, direct, develop, and motivate their employees. However, the application of conventional wisdom often results in top-down systems that are excessively bureaucratic and hinder agility. This course will help you learn how to build a growth-stage venture while keeping your employees empowered and your organization nimble. You will learn to build a solid foundation that will allow your organization to amplify its impact in today's highly volatile environment.

Educational Objectives

The goal of this course is to expose you to management systems used by ventures to overcome tradeoffs between scale and agility. By ventures, we mean entrepreneurial organizations prioritizing innovation and employee empowerment, rather than standardization and tight monitoring of rote processes. This is not a course about launching a startup or financing it, nor a course about highly stable, established enterprises. This course is about leading and managing an entrepreneurial organization as it accelerates growth, usually the point at which most ventures need to formalize management systems. Through cases, readings, and a final project, the course will introduce the tools organizations need to enable growth across one or more markets, while continually adapting to new and changing circumstances.

Course Content

a. Formalizing management systems to support growth. You will learn about why, when, and how ventures start to formalize management systems—for example, developing operating budgets and determining different job functions— and how they evolve these systems and functions through various stages of growth. You will also learn about how executives adjust management systems to different forms of growth—organic, inorganic (through M&A), franchising or licensing, and so on. Our discussions will highlight the core tension of this course for high-growth organizations — between empowering employees or teams to adapt to new markets and implementing formal systems to drive disciplined execution.

b. Driving results. Employees in growth-stage ventures must explore new opportunities in the market while driving the growth of offerings where the organization has already achieved product-market fit. You will learn how to design performance alignment systems, such as Objectives and Key Results systems (OKRs), Balanced Scorecards (BSCs), and Performance-potential models, to hold employees accountable for driving financial results for established offers, while encouraging them to uncover new opportunities for offerings and growth.

c. Agility and empowerment. Next, you will learn how to develop decision-support dashboards and guidelines, as well as agile teams, to enable employees to share best practices and achieve coordination, while preserving employees’ empowerment and ability to continue learning (e.g., through a Structured Empowerment Framework). You will also uncover how data analysis (including AI and machine learning techniques) can be incorporated into the development of such dashboards and guidelines.

d. Building systems for learning. Growth-stage ventures that empower their employees also need to ensure that those employees have the skills to find out how to drive results. You will learn how to build feedback and information systems to (a) initially train employees, (b) provide them with direct feedback on their decisions (e.g., through performance assessments), (c) promote peer-to-peer feedback (e.g., through enterprise social networks), and (d) engage employees in developing new ideas and best practices (e.g., through surveys, contests, agile process and teams, and A/B testing).

e. Connecting empowerment to culture. Beyond holding employees accountable, growth-stage organizations need to build a culture promoting the pursuit of shared goals in line with the organization’s purpose and values—not just the goals of emerging silos. You will examine systems (such as value-based recruitment and training, value-based assessments, and rituals) used to keep employees aligned with the growing organization’s values and purpose.

Final Project/Report. The course will provide you with the opportunity to work with a growth-stage venture, applying concepts and tools from the course to solve problems and uncover new ways to foster growth as a consulting team would. You will be asked to deliver a final report or presentation to the organization and then to submit a final report for the course.

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