1장
The Entrepreneurial Revolution Inside Established Companies
What if the key to revitalizing large corporations wasn't about becoming more efficient, but about rediscovering entrepreneurship? This is the provocative question at the heart of "New to Big," a groundbreaking work that has become required reading in boardrooms across America. Written by serial entrepreneur David Kidder and Harvard Business School graduate Christina Wallace, the book has been praised by innovation leaders from Microsoft to Nike as the definitive playbook for corporate reinvention. After selling his company Clickable and authoring the bestselling "Startup Playbook," Kidder's breakfast conversation with GE's Beth Comstock sparked a revolutionary idea: large enterprises don't need to be innovation dinosaurs-they just need a separate system for discovering and scaling new growth. This insight led to the creation of Bionic, a company dedicated to installing entrepreneurial "Growth Operating Systems" in Fortune 500 companies. With case studies from Citi, Microsoft, P&G, and other industry giants, the book reveals how any established company can combine startup agility with corporate scale to discover exponential growth opportunities.
2장
The Corporate Innovation Crisis: How We Got Here
The business landscape has transformed dramatically since 2001. Today's market leaders-Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook-have displaced traditional blue-chip companies by prioritizing new growth over core business efficiencies. This shift didn't happen overnight.
In the late 1800s, family-run corporations operated with gratitude for the American business environment, balancing care for employees, customers, and stockholders almost equally. As professional managers replaced owner-founders in the mid-20th century, they focused on efficiency metrics like RONA and IRR, making waste elimination paramount. Yet through the 1960s, corporations still built domestic factories, created middle-class jobs, and strengthened the American economy.
Everything changed in the 1970s. Globalization and increased competition shrank profit margins, creating tension between stakeholders. When Jensen and Meckling published their influential 1976 paper attacking managerial capitalism, they claimed corporations weren't fulfilling their responsibility to shareholders. This resonated with investors demanding better market performance. By the 1980s, executive compensation became tied to stock prices, fundamentally altering corporate priorities.
The efficiency obsession intensified with Six Sigma's adoption in the late 1980s, directing all creative energy toward tweaking existing systems rather than true innovation. Companies became viewed as bundles of financial assets rather than groups of people solving customer problems. Ironically, this shareholder focus actually yielded worse stock returns than before.
The late 1990s saw internet companies flourish, with investors eagerly snapping up stocks from frequent IPOs. When the bubble burst in March 2000, dozens of Wall Street darlings folded overnight-mainly because they lacked sound business models. Yet this period laid crucial groundwork. Over the next decade, entrepreneurs learned to build businesses rapidly, focusing on solving customer problems rather than pleasing shareholders.
By 2018, a major shift was underway. BlackRock founder Larry Fink informed CEOs he was no longer interested in companies manipulating share prices through buybacks and short-term fixes. He demanded companies serve a social purpose, noting that those without one would "ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders."
Enterprises now face triple pressure: focus on customer value, contribute to society, and satisfy Wall Street's quarterly demands. The solution? A new management approach specifically designed for uncertainty and built around customer needs-a Growth Operating System that runs alongside traditional business functions, combining startup agility with corporate expertise and scale.
3장
From TAM to TAP: Discovering New Markets
Traditional companies excel at growing market share and refining existing processes but struggle with the unknowable-the territory where startups thrive. This fundamental difference requires a shift in thinking from Total Addressable Market (TAM) to Total Addressable Problem (TAP).
Startups excel by identifying customer pain points and thinking "There must be a better way!" This problem-solving obsession gives entrepreneurs boundless permission to experiment with solutions. Rather than fighting for market share, they create entirely new markets, experimenting cheaply and quickly with remarkable learning velocity.
Established companies, conversely, view the world through self-built lenses that turn ideas inward. Their brainstorming typically starts with internal concerns: "We're losing market share" or "We have a technology, let's find a customer for it." This inside-out thinking persists because enterprises are hardwired for the "knowable" business but flounder with the "unknowable."
While TAM works for existing markets and customers, it fails in unknown territory. The TAP framework takes a different approach: identifying significant customer problems, working backward to define solutions, and crafting business models around them. Mobile phones illustrate this shift perfectly-initially marketed to executives with time-sensitive needs, they evolved to address the broader TAP of "mobile communication" for everyone.
TD Ameritrade's innovation journey demonstrates the power of problem-focused exploration. After an innovation sprint yielded a seemingly game-changing digital tool that executives unanimously supported, a three-person team was tasked with developing it further. Instead of rushing to build, they examined fundamental assumptions about customer needs through experiments with potential customers. Within just two weeks, they confidently invalidated the opportunity area-there was no real demand. Rather than seeing this as failure, CEO Tim Hockey celebrated how quickly and cheaply they'd avoided a potentially costly investment in an unwanted product.
When researching customer needs, we must interview both current users of solutions and those deliberately avoiding them. This contrast reveals both the appeal and limitations of existing approaches. By observing rather than just asking, we discover what people actually do versus what they claim. This approach transforms how we define business opportunities-like a candy company realizing they're not in the sugar business but the "treat yourself" business.
Sizing non-existent markets requires educated guesswork. Three essential calculations help estimate an opportunity's potential: measuring the existing market using proxy solutions, estimating how many people need a better solution and what they'd pay, and projecting how many would want this solution if available. Consider orders of magnitude-is the opportunity 10x, 100x or 1000x the current market? As demonstrated by Uber, which exploded beyond the $100 billion taxi market, revolutionary solutions can create markets far larger than historical data suggests.
In this new ecosystem, employees become entrepreneurs while executives function as investors-but both must adopt new mindsets. Leaders must become ambidextrous, operating core businesses while creating new growth. This requires granting teams permission to question established wisdom, disrupt core businesses, run experiments, invalidate assumptions, and move quickly-essentially allowing startup behavior within established enterprises.
4장
The Growth Leader Challenge: Becoming Ambidextrous
Modern corporate leaders must transform into growth leaders-becoming ambidextrous by operating existing businesses while creating new ones. This fundamental shift requires abandoning comfortable practices that brought previous success. The authors identify ten essential mindset shifts for growth leaders:
1. Turn Outside In: Most enterprises overvalue their internal knowledge while underestimating external forces. True growth comes from "outside in" thinking: identifying external forces, market shifts, and emerging enablers that can solve customer problems exponentially better than current solutions. One energy company exemplifies this approach by developing drone-based solutions while patiently monitoring regulatory changes, ensuring they'll be "right and on time" when regulations finally shift.
2. Focus on Do vs. Say: Customer behavior reveals far more commercial truth than what customers say in traditional research. Growth leaders validate solutions through customer actions rather than stated preferences. They design experiments with clear "asks" that require value exchange, create unbiased feedback environments, and employ various testing methods to gauge true customer commitment rather than hypothetical interest. Tesla exemplifies this approach by securing $1,000 deposits for Model 3 cars years before delivery, demonstrating real customer intent backed by cash.
3. Embrace Productive Failure: Productive failure means lowering the cost and increasing the speed of learning through small, fast, cheap failures that point in the right direction. Many successful products emerged from failures: WD-40 (named for 40 failed attempts), Bubble Wrap (originally failed wallpaper), and synthetic fabric dye (failed antimalarial drug). Growth-oriented companies must try many approaches, accept most will fail, extract wisdom from failures, and create systems ensuring failures remain productive.
4. Expire Your Data: Business cycles accelerate dramatically with each technological revolution. Agricultural knowledge remained relevant for millennia, industrial revolution knowledge for centuries, but internet knowledge becomes outdated within decades, and mobile internet knowledge within years. Many business models that failed during the dot-com boom, like pet food delivery (Pets.com), have become profitable businesses two decades later (Chewy). The question becomes not "That doesn't work" but "Why could this work now?"
5. End Your Addiction to Being Right: Our brains are wired to avoid being wrong. This addiction to being right makes us intolerable and ineffective. Andy Grove, Intel's legendary CEO, championed "disagree and commit"-allowing team members to voice disagreement while simultaneously committing to make the chosen path work, recognizing nobody has complete certainty. Growth leaders ask open-ended questions rather than giving answers and make decisions based on collected evidence even when it contradicts established wisdom.
6. Lead Bullets Only: Corporate storytellers love silver bullets-simple, magical solutions to complex problems. But the real world doesn't work that way. "Lead Bullets Only" acknowledges growth requires hard work and multiple approaches, not a single magical fix. Companies must invest resources, time, and political capital to develop robust growth capabilities rather than chasing innovation "flavors of the month."
7. Don't Love Things to Death: Like Steinbeck's Lennie who loved soft animals but killed them through excessive affection, companies often smother promising innovations with resources and attention. Experienced entrepreneurs know that first customer revenue is often "wrong" revenue-early adopters aren't representative of the broader market. Counterintuitively, constraints foster creativity more than unlimited resources. Growth leaders must balance leveraging corporate assets with preserving genuine entrepreneurial environments.
8. Build Ladders to the Moon: While "moonshot" has become corporate buzz, true innovation requires methodical ladder-building rather than catapult-style big bets. SpaceX demonstrates this perfectly-starting in 2001 with simple exploration of Russian rockets, then building their own spacecraft (2008), achieving recovery protocols (2010), launching satellite delivery services (2012-2013), mastering controlled landings (2015), and finally reusing rockets (2017). Each step builds competency, creating a complete path to ambitious goals rather than one-shot attempts.
9. No Success Theater: Success theater-making people think you're successful instead of actually serving customers-is deadly for innovation. It's accompanied by vanity metrics that look impressive but fail to measure true business health. Growth leaders must put on their "big-kid pants" to hear and deliver bad news, measuring what's really happening rather than cherry-picking positive metrics.
10. Be an Ambidextrous Leader: Every business faces the trade-off between creating new ventures and operating existing ones. True growth leaders must become ambidextrous, handling both creation and execution. As Facebook's Fidji Simo says, "Build a culture that makes change totally expected and acceptable" by focusing on problems rather than products.
5장
Discovery: Finding Unmet Customer Needs
Before creating solutions, we must first define the problem-understanding who experiences it, how often, and how deeply it affects their lives. Discovery, the first step of the Growth OS, means exploring issues and identifying technologies that could address them effectively. This requires shifting focus from our core competencies to customers' daily headaches.
With technology adoption accelerating dramatically-tablets reached 10% adoption in just five years compared to electricity's thirty-we can't rely on traditional MBA tools designed for stable markets. When building in rapidly changing environments where the future doesn't resemble the past, strategic planning breaks down and discovery becomes essential.
The Discovery process involves six steps:
1. Assemble a small, designated team: Discovery work needs a leader who can envision what the company could be doing beyond current operations-often a contrarian with imagination and courage to challenge the CEO. The team should include 3-4 creative questioners with diverse expertise for a 10-12 week process.
2. Pick a group of potential customers, listen, and observe: Rather than studying everyone, focus on specific demographic or psychographic groups with needs you believe you can solve in new ways. Start with subjects demonstrating extreme behaviors to understand the range of needs-they either have acute pain points or have created novel solutions to common problems.
3. Consider relevant enablers: After identifying problems, explore innovative ways to solve them using relevant enablers-trends, technologies, or business models. While most human problems are age-old (nourishment, appearance, communication), new enablers like vertical farming, AI, 3D printing, blockchain, or peer-to-peer models can introduce substantially better solutions.
4. Understand the ecosystems: Pain points and enablers exist within complex ecosystems. By examining market activity-like Black Panther's perfectly-timed release during heightened racial justice conversations-we can spot when enablers and cultural shifts will collide.
5. Plot the Discovery Grid: The Discovery Grid visualizes the intersection of consumer needs (y-axis) and enabling technologies (x-axis). We plot competitors at their respective intersections and identify blank spaces-potential Opportunity Areas where no one has ventured yet.
6. Consider sizing, timing, and fit of each OA: The final Discovery step evaluates potential Opportunity Areas through three critical lenses. For sizing, we examine proxy markets to estimate potential impact. For timing, we identify potential blockers like regulations and ask "Why now?"-understanding what's changed since others failed with similar ventures.
Discovery takes time and resources, but it's essential groundwork. By investing in understanding your market, researching enablers, and seeing the entire ecosystem, you build new ventures from informed wisdom. You don't just know what to do-you know it hasn't been tried before and will significantly impact a specific customer base.
6장
Validation: Testing Ideas Like a Startup
Every startup begins with four key assumptions: there's a cohesive customer group with a common problem; the solution actually solves that problem; and the business model is viable. While entrepreneurs validate these assumptions before scaling, enterprises typically skip this critical seed stage, making big bets on unvalidated solutions.
Validation formalizes entrepreneurship methodology for established companies, drawing from Eric Ries's Lean Startup approach, Stanford d.school's Design Thinking, and Steve Blank's Business Model Canvas. This creates a repeatable process for refining startups through experiment-based learning, increasing learning speed while decreasing costs.
OA teams consist of "cofounders"-employees from various levels working as equals. Unlike typical project teams, these in-house entrepreneurs commit to solving customer problems by validating multiple ideas. Teams typically include three full-time members: a Commercial leader (the communicator/"startup CEO"), a Technical member (the analytical problem-solver/"maker"), and an Insights person (the "customer whisperer").
Every startup begins with hypotheses about customers, problems, solutions, and business models. Good hypotheses contain simple, focused assumptions conveying one important idea directly related to the solution and business model. For example, when considering a pet health monitoring device for millennials, "American pet-owning millennials are actively monitoring their pets' health" is just right-simple, focused, and actionable.
When testing hypotheses, we must avoid creating false positives by simply asking customers about their needs. What customers say often differs dramatically from what they do. Effective experiments uncover insights about actual behaviors rather than relying on customer self-awareness or imagination.
While enterprises favor extensive surveys, entrepreneurs prefer quick, inexpensive experiments on small groups. The guiding question is always: "What's the quickest, cheapest thing we can do to decrease risk and increase confidence?" Bionic's validation experiments include Customer Problem Interviews/Ethnography to uncover latent needs, Fliers/Pop-ups to gauge reactions to hypothetical solutions, and later-stage prototypes like Landing Page Tests and Wizard of Oz Tests. For products ready for launch, pre-sales campaigns provide the ultimate validation-customers handing over actual money.
Validation isn't linear but recursive-"like making bread. The dough rises, and you punch it down." This process occurs across three interconnected seed stages:
1. Seed 1: Search for the root cause of the customer problem: This stage focuses on uncovering deep insights into people and their problems' root causes. The goal is validating whether there's a real problem (not just a hunch), whether there's a cohesive group feeling this problem acutely enough to seek solutions, and how big the Total Addressable Problem (TAP) is for that group.
2. Seed 2: Putting solutions through their paces: This stage ensures we offer exponentially better solutions (10x better) than what customers currently use. It's about acquiring first customers in a beachhead market and testing proposed solutions through higher-fidelity prototypes. Successful solutions must be "Painkillers, Not Vitamins"-solving big, painful, persistent problems that customers need solved consistently, not just nice-to-have products that sit unused.
3. Seed 3: Honing the business model: After confirming the customer problem and testing proposed solutions, this stage focuses on validating a repeatable, scalable business model. This involves testing the economic exchange of value, identifying key metrics, and anticipating operational challenges.
The Children's Cancer Association's experience with validation demonstrates how the process works in practice. When their initial solutions for teen cancer patients yielded no response, they pivoted to holding design-thinking workshops. These forums became the very solution teens wanted: a way to connect with peers while co-creating programming. This led to the Young Adult Alliance, where teens could provide input on programs while finding purpose and connection. The process helped them be more intentional with donor money and embed innovation thinking across the organization.
7장
The Growth Board: Investing Like a VC
Most people wrongly assume disruptive ideas only come from startups, but many established companies have talented intrapreneurs with innovative ideas. The problem is these creators lack viable pathways to market, facing budget cycles, ROI demands, and resistance from those protecting existing revenue streams. The real issue isn't a lack of ideas or leadership support-it's the absence of a direct venue for ideas to reach leadership and permission for teams to pursue them. This is where the Growth Board comes in.
The Growth Board model emerged during David Kidder's work at GE when Oil & Gas CEO Lorenzo Simonelli asked how to reclaim funds from unviable programs and get teams to reveal commercial truth. Kidder realized the venture capital funding model-with staged investments requiring evidence at each phase-could apply to enterprise growth investments. This approach allows investing small amounts when risk is high and continuing funding as projects show progress, instilling startup-like scrappiness.
Corporate executives often resist the "large portfolio of bets" approach, fearing massive expenditures on potentially failing ventures. But venture capital returns follow power-law distributions-65% of investments lose money, 25% provide moderate returns, and only 10% generate significant profits, with the top 6% accounting for 60% of total profits. This makes it incredibly unlikely to stumble upon a winner with just a few ventures.
Members of the Growth Board serve as investors, sounding boards, and diplomats with three key responsibilities:
1. Set growth goals: Define clear growth goals for the company, including revenue targets, market objectives, and determining which market forces are having the greatest impact.
2. Manage portfolio health: Measure portfolio health through four components: Focus (alignment with growth goals), Size (whether there are enough bets to hit goals), Quality (assessing teams, opportunity areas, and proprietary gifts being leveraged), and Velocity (how quickly startups move through the investment funnel).
3. Enable growth capability: Model Growth OS mindsets and give permission for teams to tell the commercial truth. Remove organizational roadblocks and identify the right talent to drive New to Big growth.
New to Big growth can only succeed if led by senior leaders, particularly the CEO-this is non-negotiable. Without the CEO personally driving this initiative, no one else will either. The ideal Growth Board consists of six to eight executives with a mix of commercial and financial backgrounds who have the moral, financial, and strategic authority to make decisions.
The authors recommend including an External Venture Partner (EVP) on the Growth Board to provide crucial outside perspective. The EVP counsels board members, gives entrepreneurial perspective, and provides one-on-one coaching, steering members away from ingrained leadership behaviors that might quash the entrepreneurial process.
Executive Sponsors bridge the Validation work of cofounders and the investment work of the Growth Board. Similar to a partner at a VC firm who led an investment, they push cofounder thinking, ensure validation rigor, and remove roadblocks.
Growth Board meetings occur quarterly and typically take half a day, with OA teams presenting their hypotheses, experiments, and requests. After presentations, the board holds closed-door discussions to decide on continued support through funding, acquisitions, permissions, or connections.
8장
The Human Element: It All Comes Down to People
The authors emphasize that New to Big transformation cannot happen without people-smart, dedicated, imaginative, collaborative, and visionary humans. However, they acknowledge a troubling paradox: when employees in large companies are reassigned to "innovation" teams, it often signals their career is slow-tracking or even ending. Innovation departments have become places "where careers go to die," creating a system that punishes those who take risks to build new things.
The organizational work needed for Growth OS implementation requires adapting existing talent management systems to support entrepreneurial functions and cultivating entrepreneurial skills in promising employees. This demands a creative HR partner who can dedicate significant time to the Growth OS.
The authors present four essential talent principles for successfully implementing the Growth OS:
1. Players and promoters: Like theater productions, Growth OS requires two key groups: "players" who are fully dedicated to the program, and "promoters" who are integral but also working on other projects. Both groups must be cared for appropriately.
2. It must be safe to try: Participants will be asked to abandon normal processes and take significant career risks. They need solid assurances they won't be punished, stalled, demoted or replaced for stepping up.
3. Do the easy thing that's good enough: Since Growth OS initially affects only 20-30 people, HR partners should run small-scale experiments-finding the easiest solutions that work well enough to learn from.
4. Value performance of the team over the individual: Entrepreneurship is inherently collective, meaning individual effectiveness only matters if it contributes to team effectiveness-the opposite of most big organizations' philosophy.
Despite leadership concerns about lacking the right people for Growth OS work, the authors assure that necessary talent already exists within the organization. Deep within are employees with entrepreneurial sensibilities who love ambiguity and experimentation, constantly imagining better solutions. These "misfits" need coaxing out by demonstrating the career-changing potential of this work.
Cofounders must be 100% dedicated to their Opportunity Area work-not just as a side project. The authors draw a parallel to venture capital: investors would never fund part-time entrepreneurs who haven't gone all-in. This full dedication is essential because entrepreneurs need to obsess about customer problems to uncover insights that create massive commercial opportunity.
While there's no universal formula for translating traditional compensation into Growth OS rewards, the authors offer several principles: hold compensation steady for at least six months to see if participants fit the work; make evaluation criteria clear from day one; involve Executive Sponsors in designing performance expectations; define both positive and negative behaviors; reward teams rather than individuals; and publicly communicate when Growth OS participants are promoted.
9장
Building a Permanent Growth Capability
Before installing the Growth OS in your organization, you must define success-either through new growth (launching innovative offerings with healthy ROI) or growth capability (creating sustainable systems for portfolio-building). Ideally, you want both: immediate growth and the machine to generate it repeatedly.
The challenge is that everything in established companies is designed for Big to Bigger work-from e-commerce platforms to executive decision-making-making these capabilities become disabilities when disruption is needed. As Citi's Jud Linville advises, leaders must understand organizational resistance, honor it, then address it by creating a "test kitchen" for New to Big development while preparing systems to scale successes.
Since Growth OS work differs dramatically from typical corporate processes, an Operations Team is essential to remove barriers that would otherwise slow OA teams to a glacial pace. This team of creative problem-solvers should include champions from key functions like legal, marketing, IT/security, finance, and compliance.
The implementation process involves three phases:
1. Phase 1: Configure a pilot: Start small with a 9-month horizon and focused objectives. Establish the Ops Team of barrier-busting "ninjas," introduce growth mindsets, and identify internal gaps. Document everything meticulously-the successes, failures, and learnings-as these will become teaching materials for future cohorts.
2. Phase 2: Expand into the business units: Once your initial teams have demonstrated impact and mastered their roles enough to teach others, expand deeper into the company. This 12-18 month phase focuses on experimentation and learning, where you'll codify the framework developed during the pilot into formal training materials. Target business units with both growth potential and proven stability-not struggling units but those with breathing room to experiment.
3. Phase 3: Scaling the Growth OS: Once you've successfully replicated the Growth OS pilot within several business units and seen progress, you're ready to scale across the organization. This 18-24 month phase focuses on enterprise-wide rollout of New to Big mindsets and mechanics, building a bench of coaches from successful Phase 1 and 2 cofounders, creating a Growth OS playbook to codify learnings, and maturing talent programs.
Citi's D10X program exemplifies successful Growth OS scaling. Founded under Chief Innovation Officer Debby Hopkins and later led by Vanessa Colella, D10X adapted the Growth OS to create a "horizontal platform" for innovation across the enterprise. Rather than waiting to create a meticulous long-term plan, they launched quickly, embraced mistakes, and remained brutally honest about what worked and what didn't. D10X has launched nearly one hundred active startups across Citi's major businesses while maintaining Big to Bigger systems for core operations.
10장
Playing to Win: Going on Offense
The best predictor of New to Big success is the CEO's mindset. If leadership doesn't directly own and drive New to Big, growth simply won't happen. Enterprises don't have money, ideas, or talent problems-they have leadership problems. Leaders have lost the incentive and skill to create growth as a permanent capability.
Like Bezos's "Day One" mindset at Amazon, organizations must preserve their entrepreneurial energy to avoid stasis (Day Two) and decline (Day Three). This raises a crucial question: Are you playing to win, or just playing not to lose? Research shows soccer players convert 92% of penalty kicks when making the shot would result in a win, versus only 62% when missing would cause a loss-same kick, different mindset.
Most organizations are playing not to lose, making "innovation" an empty buzzword. Growth is different: urgent, grounded in commercial truth, and unrestricted. Enterprises can win the second round of disruption by leveraging their secret weapons: loyal customers, distribution channels, manufacturing capabilities, and brand equity.
While you may not be a founder, you can be a "refounder" like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, who challenged his company to look beyond legacy products and invest in cloud computing, AI, and strategic acquisitions. The Growth OS creates a New to Big machine that, alongside your Big to Bigger operation, enables you to discover ideas at startup speed while launching them at enterprise scale.
Your leadership legacy depends on transforming your organization to contribute to an equitable, accessible, and sustainable future. With your resources and scale, you can make change happen instantly. The question is not whether you can afford to embrace this new approach-it's whether you can afford not to.
