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Processes are not enough to drive growth. There needs to a number of support mechanisms that ensure the processes flow properly. These are what I refer to as the platforms for growth. There are three main platforms: Strategic, Organization, and Networks. The Strategic platform ensures the necessary flow of information into, out, and across the company to ensure the best possible growth decisions are made.

First, there needs to be mechanisms to ensure organizational alignment of the growth strategy. A communication plan should define how critical information will be disseminated to the right people. This includes communicating the high level strategy to all employees, a clear strategy roadmap that will help the growth leaders understand the company's growth strategy over the next 3-5 years, and regular reports to growth leaders to help them understand recent decisions and their results. The top mission of alignment is to ensure the right information gets into the hands of the right people at the right time.

One good way to communicate alignment is a strategic planning session. For example, every 5 years Royal DSM conducts a strategic planning session that defines how much revenue will new product launches generate in 5 years, what new areas they plan to go into, and how their capabilities will change. Li & Fung do a similar exercise every 3 years. In between exercises, the companies review how they are performing against plan and make course corrections as necessary.

Second, a metric plan should be devised to translate the growth strategy into metric-trackable objectives and build a reporting plan around it. Starting with the defined growth strategy, identify the top level metrics that relate to each objective. For example, any strategy should have a clear new product revenue target - that is how much annual revenue in 3-5 years time will come from new products launched since today. From the top level metric, break it down into sub-metrics. For example to hit $200 million in revenue in 3 years time, a company would need 5 successful launches which implies 10 total launches which implies 20 projects started which implies 100 opportunities evaluated. All these represent targets to track. Now, you need to map how you will report on these metrics. Everyone does not need to see all metrics in a report. The CEO may only need to see the current annual revenue number and the forecast number expected by the target date, while pipeline statistic may only be of interest to innovation leaders.

Third, any strategic platform needs an inflow of competitor intelligence data. Competitive Intelligence programs should strive to know what competitors are doing and how they might respond to your strategies and tactics. Competitive Intelligence programs should know competitor's RPV - resources (assets and capabilities), processes (business models and competitive advantages), and values (vision and strategies). Understanding your competitors will help your people make the best decisions.