How The Combination of Strategy and Growth Can Get You There.

Companies love to talk about growth.

Every quarter, businesses race to report expansion. Revenue’s up. We added customers. We entered new markets.

It’s easy to measure, easy to celebrate, and that’s a good thing.

Growth is how businesses stay alive. It’s the business expression of speed; the visible metric of movement.

But growth only tells you how fast you’re moving, not whether you’re heading in the right direction.

Speed without direction can appear to be progress, yet quietly pull you away from the reason you started: the unique value your business set out to create.

Growth measures motion. Value gives that motion purpose. It’s where impact begins, and where growth finds its meaning.

Value is the difference your work makes in the world: the problems solved, behaviors changed, and outcomes improved.

It’s what customers, partners, or communities gain because you exist. In another reflective post, I made the case that value is the spark that creates the momentum you need for impact.

You don’t get value by growing faster. You get it by growing smarter: by aligning speed with direction.

• Direction is your strategy: clarity of purpose, quality of decisions, focus, and differentiation.

• Speed is your growth: the effort, testing, and execution that turn clarity into traction.

Value Is What You Create, Not What You Extract

When they work together, value compounds.

• Direction without speed means you never leave the driveway.

• Speed without direction means you drive around in circles.

• Direction and speed, together, create value: when you have both, you reach the place(s) you want.

Value is the change you create.

Strategy (direction) and growth (speed) are how you make it happen.

Direction: Strategy as a Compass

Direction is deciding what matters most and acting accordingly.

It’s the discipline to serve this customer, solve this problem, and compete in this way.

It’s how teams know which numbers matter and which distractions to ignore.

Clear direction doesn’t just guide decisions; it shapes culture. It tells people why their work counts. In its absence, growth will fragment: marketing chases volume, product chases features, and finance chases margin. And nobody agrees on what progress means.

Strategy is simply the agreement on meaning and the gumption to make decisions. What “good” looks like, for whom, and a plan to get there.

It’s how purpose becomes practical.

Speed: Growth as the Engine

Growth gives strategy its force. It’s the push that turns clarity into motion.

Growth done right is structured learning. Experiment, measure, adapt, repeat. There’s a motion to it. Each loop refines the next. My first-hand experience is that moving fast isn’t the problem; moving blindly is.

My point is, don’t try to out-run competitors, but to out-learn them. Well-informed and calibrated speed enhances knowledge and builds resilience. That’s how growth endures rather than intoxicates.

Look, strategy will keep you focused as it prevents “busyness” from becoming a waste of time. Growth, or lack thereof, on the other hand, will keep you honest: it tests whether your strategy works in the real world.

Together, they create lasting value.

What It Looks Like When It Works

You can tell when direction and speed align:

Teams move with clarity instead of urgency.

Customers feel the difference; products fit their needs instead of fighting them.

Markets notice the consistency; every move feels part of the same idea.

Companies that lead in customer experience, for example, outperform peers on both revenue and profit growth. McKinsey found that U.S. leaders in customer experience (think Zappos) grow more than twice as fast as their laggard counterparts. Forrester reports similar patterns: customer-obsessed firms see 40-plus percent higher revenue growth and roughly 50 percent higher profit growth.

Those results are not happenstance; they come from coherence.

When strategy (direction) and growth (speed) reinforce each other, trust is established, reputation improves, and results follow.

That’s what value looks like in action.

Value as the Foundation of Impact

Value is impact’s first expression; the proof that what you make matters to someone beyond your balance sheet.

It’s how purpose becomes performance.

It’s the bridge between what a company believes and what the world experiences.

But value alone doesn’t scale.

Strategy without people, systems, and trust remains just a theory.

That’s where the next lever of impact begins: capability, the capacity of teams and cultures to deliver, learn, and adapt. Because even the clearest strategy fades without people who can carry it forward.

Impact scales through capability.

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