Remember the childhood game Tag? The kid who is “it” chases other kids and tries to tap them. The person who cannot escape the pursuer gets “tagged,” and they become “it,” and the chase resumes.

Fun when you’re a kid. Not so much when you are in business, running around trying to chase business growth, to the point where it sometimes seems like one “it” after another. This market expansion strategy, that innovation push, this acquisition, that AI solution.

None of these efforts are bad. It’s just that 72%-88% of them fail, and that statistic has barely changed over decades, regardless of the specific type of industry, growth strategy, or enablement attempted.

Why Most Business Growth Initiatives Fail

Why the tremendously frustrating failure rate and accompanying waste of resources? Ironically, the typical way of going about growth is missing the key dynamic that causes growth in any system – integration.

Integration is a familiar word, but in the context of business growth, it has deeper meaning and more robust implications than are usually accounted for. Sometimes even “integration initiatives” are designed in a disintegrated way.

For example, a company buys a smaller competitor for its technology. The deal team models the synergies, sets the targets, and hands off. Integration becomes a checklist: consolidate systems, cut redundant roles, hit the cost numbers. Within two years, the technology works, but the people who understood it have left, the customers they served feel orphaned, and the acquired team’s way of solving problems—the thing that made the technology valuable—is gone. The spreadsheet says the deal closed. The value walked out the door.

What Is Integrated Growth?

There is another way: Integrated Growth.

Integrated Growth is the insightful and daily integration of human excellence—creativity, judgment, synergistic relationships, and the drive to build something bigger than oneself—with material affordances—the finances, technologies, natural resources, infrastructure, and other assets that make and sustain things valued in the world.

Growing a business is a daily ground game. Weave human excellence and material affordances together, wisely and daily, around a shared Core, and three things compound: the business grows, the people find new value worth investing in, and the economy they share gets stronger—with each round of growth revealing the next.

And by economy they share, I mean the real one businesses trade in every day—employees, customers, suppliers, partners, influencers, and the local, national, and international markets where they compete and operate. The gains land in those economic relationships: contracts renewed, talent retained, and customers and employees who like what is happening so much that they become your natural salesforce—one of the surest signs a company is positioned to grow.

The Leadership Mindset Behind Long-Term Growth

Sound too good to be true? It is rare, but only because what goes on behind the scenes in companies and their networks that keep growing has, until now, been largely the intuitive knowledge of a group of leaders that I call Integrated Growth Leaders.

They may do their best to give you three simple reasons, or you may read a book that has five secrets to growth as sweeping areas to attend to, but there is ALWAYS more to it than that. Sometimes the moves are astonishingly simple. Sometimes they require connecting the dots that others have not seen and then helping them connect the dots so they own it. But now we have a map for growth that has positive ripple effects.

Discovering the Third Angle Integrated Growth System (TAIGS™)

By learning the craft through the school of hard knocks, and by associating with dozens of leaders who have good instincts but could not tell the whole story of why, when, and how some growth efforts worked while others failed, I have been able to uncover the system for Integrated Growth—not just a model or a checklist, but a system—with inputs, throughputs, interactions, outputs, feedback, and other system elements and dynamics named and activated.

One of the coolest things about the system we uncovered is that most of the inputs and current and potential interactions for growth (assets and opportunities) are right under our feet or just around the corner. In fact, it is by missing those close but hidden things that most often torpedoes efforts to grow.

Think about it—businesses have most of what they need within their networks to integrate, innovate, and grow to new levels.

Those assets and opportunities are often overlooked, dampened by processes, fixed mindsets, and cultural habits. They are disintegrated from each other. The work of the Third Angle Integrated Growth System (TAIGS™) is to surface these Hidden Treasures, integrate them, and convert that wasted potential into value.

How TAIGS™ Helps Leaders Drive Integrated Growth

In the game of business growth, when you apply TAIGS™ you're it. You are “it,” but you learn how to spread the energy so growth becomes the business of many players at once, not just your initiative.

You are not running around chasing disconnected elements of your business, hoping you catch the right one to make the handoff. You, the Integrated Growth Leader, and your team are the strategic orchestrators, using both formal and informal power and weaving together, daily and throughout the life of a project, the human excellence and material affordances that make businesses go.

It’s a game you can win—and use to help others win—if you are willing to learn the system and grow while you are learning and using it.

Learn More About the Third Angle Integrated Growth System

Want to learn more about it? Stay tuned for our blog series on Integrated Growth.

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