Smart Growth - Live with Harvard Business Review Press

AmCham is association with Harvard Business Review Press is bringing you top writers of management books. At this on-line event Whitney Johnson is CEO of the Disruption Advisors introduced the key insights from his new book Smart Growth.

How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

Leading teams and organizations to greatness has never been more challenging than it is now. But there is opportunity amidst the chaos.

We are now in an era of post-traumatic stress growth. An Egon Zehnder study reports that 80% of CEOs agreed they needed to transform themselves as well as their organizations—up from 26% before the pandemic. In her new book Smart growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Review Press; January 11, 2022) Whitney Johnson provides a set of tools to get serious about growth.

Johnson provides a deep dive into her S Curve of Learning framework, based on the diffusion curve pioneered by E.M. Rogers, and refined during her collaboration with the late Harvard Business School icon, Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma). With authority and accessibility, she gives us a new way to think about growth and how we experience it, to help us consider where we are, and what’s next.

The S Curve of Learning is a simple visual model that shows every new skill learned and every challenge faced, as distinct learning curve. By pointing to our innate desire to learn, and putting it into action, Johnson helps readers chart their own growth, and answer three important questions:

• Why is it so hard to start something new?
• How do you gain and maintain momentum once you start?
• Why, once you are good at something, do you feel like you can’t keep doing it?

Drawing on her experience helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals, Johnson outlines how the S Curve of Learning can help leaders grow their organizations, attract and retain top talent, execute succession planning, and configure a team.

People aren’t the most valuable resource of an organization—they are the organization. With Smart Growth Whitney Johnson provides the crucial resource to support individual - and corporate – success.

A recording of the session is available at the link.