How can companies avoid a mid-life crisis?
Companies can avoid a mid-life crisis to the extent they successfully manage opportunities at different stages in the lifecycle-milking their mature cash cows while successfully growing start ups and scaling the most promising. Consider IBM. Of course, projects at various stages in their lifecycles require very different management styles: promoting variation at the start-up stage, making tough calls to select projects for scaling, integrating businesses at the point of maturity and fixing the problems of decline. Thus, leaders responsible for an entire opportunity portfolio must select managers whose styles, competencies and enthusiasms match each life stage. And the leaders themselves face the difficulty of engaging with, supporting and disciplining these very different managers with distinct missions. To tackle that challenge, IBM created the Emerging Business Opportunity (EBO) management system in 1999. The goal was to spur IBM’s organic growth and to protect new opportunities unti
