CHAPTER EIGHT

Practicing the Necessary Art of Disengagement

For all the effort that you may have put into developing each of the discovery-driven plans for your growth portfolio, it’s important to remember that even with great planning and strict discipline, many of your projects, particularly the bold ones, are unlikely to achieve commercial success. In pursuing a portfolio of growth initiatives, you will find that, sadly, the bulk of them will never emerge as major growth drivers.1 Indeed, one study argues that it takes three thousand raw ideas to result in one commercial success.2

Lack of success does not need to be a terrible result.3 Provided that you keep your disappointments cheap, you can afford a lot of them. As we pointed out in

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