Growth isn’t born in the boardroom

The slide deck is immaculate.

The fonts are modern.

The acronyms, plentiful.

A total addressable market stretched across ten digits.

Adjacency maps drawn like a general’s war plan.

And always - always - the hockey stick, that talisman of corporate fantasy, pointing north-east as if ordained by God himself.

But the room is airless. The numbers are weightless.

This is theatre, not truth.

Because growth - real growth - does not begin in the boardroom. It begins in the blood and breath of customers.

The mirage of strategy

Here is the tragedy of the modern corporation: executives mistake cartography for territory. They believe that if they inflate the map - shade in more “whitespace” - the land itself will swell to accommodate their ambition. But maps do not move mountains. Decks do not bend demand.

Capital is wasted not because leaders lack intelligence, but because they chase abstractions. They pursue “synergies,” “platform plays,” “ecosystem bets” - phrases that sound like strategy but behave like vapor.

That’s why most “new growth initiatives” never leave the projector screen. They die as PowerPoints, mourned only by the interns who formatted the graphs.

Where growth lives

Growth is not found in a slide, but in a wound.

It begins when you sit - literally sit - beside a customer and listen until they confess where it hurts. Not a minor irritation. A pain so sharp it draws blood. Solve that, and you will not need to manufacture demand. Demand will drag you forward like a riptide.

The pattern is always the same. First, the bespoke fix - the duct-taped solution that makes one customer’s agony vanish overnight. Then, the broadening, the generalizing, the turning of one remedy into many.

But here lies the acid test: if your solution cannot repeat - if it withers when carried from the first customer to the second - you do not have a growth story. You have a consulting engagement. And consulting engagements do not scale.

The leader’s burden

So what then is the leader’s true role? It is not to applaud the theatre of glossy decks. It is to strike the set. To cut the lights. To silence the actors who mistake performance for progress.

The leader funds sparks. Not smoke. Sparks. Tiny, dangerous, incandescent. And when a spark catches - when customers pull rather than need to be pushed - the leader must shovel resources onto it with frightening speed. Because windows close. Markets harden. And in growth, hesitation is death.

The simple, savage truth

Growth is not born in the boardroom. It is found at the coalface: in the dirt, in the sweat, in the awkward silences where a customer admits, “This is killing us - can you fix it?”

Everything else is theatre. And theatre does not compound.