Co-Destiny: Overcome Growth Challenges—Yours and Your Customers’

By Atlee Valentine Pope and George F. Brown, Jr.

So, do your training teams and their business consultants know how to solve a service paradox? If not, they will not be successful with their bottom line, or their clients—not a smart move in this time of corporate and consumer financial conservatism. Business consultants and global strategy experts Atlee Valentine Pope and George F. Brown, Jr., co-founders of Chicago-based Blue Canyon Partners, answer that dilemma in their new book, “CoDestiny,” and offer trainers four other questions to ask their management teams, clients, or business consultants—such as how to anticipate and address change, understand a customer or vendor chain, tackle competitive challenges, and stay ahead of the ever-changing training industry curve—from contract management to new federal regulations to the impact of cloud computing to legal challenges and more. 

“CoDestiny” (http://www.codestinybook.com) goes beyond theory by presenting unique ideas, approaches, and tools to put your firm on a path toward profitable growth; it also represents the authors’ commitment to best practices for business growth. Pope and Brown present actionable plans that can be implemented immediately and deliver concrete results. The in-depth framework yields comprehensive, consistent, and foolproof go-to-market strategies and get-to-market implementation plans—as well as examples of successful Customer Chain Maps, Market Maps, Decision Matrix, and Relationship Maps.

“More often than not companies struggle to make the decisions that will have the most impact on their growth and bottom line,” says Pope. “CoDestiny offers all leaders—from agriculture to telecommunications—immediately executable plans and ideas on how to grow their businesses from a customer-success perspective.”

Furthermore, relying on their combined 60-years of real-world experience, Pope and Brown illustrate the same growth maximization techniques they have used successfully in the past by providing case studies. The examples outlined in “CoDestiny” provide tangible, easy-to-implement advice for any business, from a start-up to a market leader, with any product line, in any industry.

“CoDestiny’s” chapters unveil diagnostic exercises, tools, and strategies for identifying the challenges in a company’s complex, even global environment. Pope and Brown offer systematic methods for implementing tried-and-true growth strategies.

For instance, in the first section, the authors introduce and develop the concepts of customer chains, sources of value creation, value levers, and the behavioral approach to segmentation. Building on this foundation, the second section focuses on constructing effective growth strategies. The final section offers actionable implementation advice such as Top 10 Tips for Successful Strategy Implementation, including:

1. You can’t overdo the basics—focus on the “blocking and tackling” and build a solid implementation plan.
2. Treat implementation as an important process, and develop competencies around implementation.
3. Arm the implementation team with appropriate tools and solid information.
4. Connect the strategy team members and the lessons they have learned to the implementation plan and process.
5. Bring lessons from other environments into the implementation planning process.
6. Ensure that the team and its leadership are the right ones to achieve success, in terms of leadership skills, implementation skills, and key competencies.
7. Manage the customer chains—internally and externally—that are in any way connected to the success of the implementation process.
8. Set up the implementation team for success, with realistic milestones, resources to address contingencies, and the ability to achieve some early successes.
9. Preplan the monitoring process and minimize the degree to which the process ever becomes an adventure.
10. Ensure that the organization’s leaders are effectively involved and committed to success.

Though the implementation process varies greatly from one firm to the next, certain ideas, such as those listed above, are essential to the success of the process in any business environment. “CoDestiny” also covers the following topics:

• The Fundamental Principle of Linking Your Destiny with That of Your Customer
• Understand Your Customer Chain: Your Customers Want to Pay You More
• Five C’s: Commoditization, Competition, Consolidation, Channels, and Collaboration
• Business-to-Business Strategy: Three Approaches for Creating Value
• Best New Market Entry Strategies
• Globalization and Innovation
• Value Creation Through Acquisitions, Partnerships, Pricing

“CoDestiny” is available for purchase at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Borders, as well other online booksellers.

Atlee Valentine Pope is co-founder and president of Blue Canyon Partners, a strategy consulting firm that helps companies grow. She has worked with clients around the world, co-authored more than 40 papers, and has been a guest speaker at numerous business events. Before building Blue Canyon Partners, Pope served in leadership roles in several start-up ventures and was a vice president in global corporate finance with First Chicago.

George F. Brown, Jr., is CEO and co-founder of Blue Canyon Partners, where his practice allows him to contribute to solving clients’ business-to-business growth challenges. Prior to Blue Canyon, Brown held senior leadership roles in several organizations, including DRI/McGraw-Hill and ICF Kaiser International, Inc., and served as the Theodore Roosevelt Professor of Economics at the U.S. Naval War College.