Trees & Forests: Balancing Growth Initiatives in Midsized Companies

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

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My guest is John Lanman, a consumer products CEO/General Manager who cut his teeth in Marketing roles with well-known names like Thermos, Blyth Candle/Fragrances, and progressed to GM or CEO of Oriental Trading Co and Precious Moments. John and I both served as Board Members, and here John shares his thoughts on the importance of balancing growth initiatives within the context of resource constraints.

3:03 – The “forest versus the trees. As a CEO of a midsized business, you have to manage the forest. You cannot just get excited about your two or three favorite big, beautiful trees because that doesn't make the forest.”

5:03 – “To fuel a midsized business, to get it to the next level or the next inflection point – it's really never just one thing. It's a lot of little things you got to sort of line up… it is a multitude of non-sexy, smaller things…that in aggregate add up to significant overall growth for a company”

11:18 – “I've been amazed just listening a lot as a new leader. Most of the ideas for success within a company are within the walls of the company. It's just a matter of creating an environment amongst people that allows those ideas and thoughts to rise to the surface and sometimes you have to tease them out.”

12:27 – that’s “how you captured the hearts and minds of the people that you are listening to, because now you’re using their ideas.”

17:37 – “the reality is that execution is what carries the day… “

18:32 – Thomas Edison quote “Vision without Execution is Hallucination.”

20:18 – “The most difficult thing (in) smaller P&L businesses… (is the) resource constraint. For example, they were behind in digital commerce, e commerce and they were way too legacy in traditional wholesale bricks and mortar selling, and they were very good at that. But as that world shrinks… we've had to move and evolve an organization and that involves people and skill sets and moving people around retraining, finding new people for very specific roles that didn't exist in the company before and I'd say that's probably the most difficult is getting the people and skill sets aligned with the challenges facing a business.”

24:27 – “Half the battle is getting your employees to trust you that you're a credible leader, and that only comes through talking to them, constantly listening to them.”

29:34 – “The rate at which change is occurring, the speed of change is increasing every year, every month… I think the next five or 10 years are going to be more exciting and more in need of seasoned leadership than the last five or 10 years.”