How tapping into our inner tiger can spur growth.
Happy Year of the Tiger to all who celebrate the Lunar/Chinese New Year.
At NeuGroup’s monthly planning session on the eve of this new year, I shared with the team how tiger traits align with our 2022 growth strategy. I thought I would share some excerpts here.
People born in the year of the tiger are powerful, rebellious, dynamic, adventurous, fiery, and quick to react. They also have strong ethics and are very passionate about their causes.
Building Lasting Connections. NeuGroup is passionate about our vision to bring together finance professionals who want to share and learn. As we move beyond treasury to a strategic finance focus, we are taking a big step toward fulfilling this mission. Market signals reveal that our strategic finance (a.k.a. Office of the CFO) orientation is in line with other thought leaders, who will likely recognize our fiery devotion and support our growth and prosperity. While it may take several years to realize our vision of becoming the platform of choice for leading financial professionals who want to develop their strategic finance talent, we are getting closer to it every year. We will accelerate our growth by remaining dynamic, adventurous and agile, reacting to market shifting demands swiftly and in innovative ways.
Change is a constant. Embracing change is essential to our success, and we have proven our agility in the way we’ve adapted to the massive disruption of the past few years. While I understand the impulse to slow down and catch our breath, the ability to adjust quickly to shifting conditions is a critical competitive advantage; it’s one that we cannot afford to forgo. Therefore, we must build on the bravery, agility and strength we’ve demonstrated since the start of the pandemic, in order to accelerate growth and make this a prosperous year.
Reimagining the meeting experience. We cannot just go back to the old way of doing things. Even as we continue to support our stakeholders with virtual meetings and interactive sessions, we must make our mark with the return to in-person, in-real-life meetings, we aim to spearhead the shift away from an isolationist or fearful mindset about going back out into the world by offering members an unrivaled in-person meeting experience. Our desire to reinvent how we execute in-person events pre-dates the pandemic. However, this is an opportune time to redesign our service delivery and operating model to enable us to continue to scale and maintain our leadership position. That means questioning legacy processes and offerings.
I dubbed my meeting transformation project “Party by NeuGroup,” because I think we need to incorporate elements of party planning in our events. If you can marry great content with memorable experiences, you can forge lasting relationships. That’s why people spend so much on weddings.
This does not only apply to the in-person events, but also virtual sessions, which I think of as “shows”, with time slots that need to be booked, while remaining proactive about upending our schedule to address breaking news or un-anticipated events.
Ambitious growth is not synonymous with abandoning our work/life balance. I believe we can unleash our inner tiger by working smarter. To scale up, we need to provide our staff with learning opportunities and professional development to enable them to assume greater accountability for delivering on our strategic vision.
Attracting more tigers. To deliver a unique and memorable meeting experience, we must grow and attract more adventurous, agile, brave and intellectually curious people who want to be part of something that’s getting bigger and share our passion for the mission. If you are a tiger or know of one who might be interested, please let us know.
