Peter Drucker famously declared that any business has two basic functions – marketing and innovation. These functions create business results through growth (i.e., paying customers), and everyone in the organization needs to focus on and contribute to those results.
Sustaining a business requires learning how to balance that focus to deliver growth, both now and in the future. Most successful companies have a handle on today’s growth. But when it comes to future growth through innovation, companies with highly engineered new products struggle.
With long, complex development cycles and a process that involves nearly every part of the organization, it's easy for new product initiatives to get bogged down or underdeliver. By some estimates, only 60% of new products meet their first-year sales targets and go on to be successful.
So what can leaders do to turn that around and make new products into a reliable competitive advantage for future growth? A secret weapon is organizational alignment. Getting everyone pulling in the right direction along these three dimensions: