Growth leadership as practice: Leadership, collaboration and growth of knowledge-based organizations

In an economy marked by uncertainty and accelerated through digital technologies, firms face having to renew their businesses continuously to create sustained profitable growth. Enterprises such as Kodak, Merrill Lynch and Tesco - once admired leaders - have gone bankrupt, have been sold or are in trouble. At the same time, large technology players such as Amazon and Apple, and fast growing start-ups such as Airbnb and Uber, have already disrupted or are about to transform whole industries. Given their need for sustained change and growth, enterprises are gearing up to meet these new challenges by building many different and transient competitive advantages (McGrath, 2013). A closer look at practice and research, however, reveals that many of their activities are focused on the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of achieving change and growth, and they lack a collective sense of ‘why’ in going about their efforts. The fact that these dimensions so often lack integration may explain why so few growth initiatives succeed. In response, this dissertation explores how leadership practice creates collaboration in continuously growing critical knowledge assets and performance. It integrates established perspectives from organizational knowledge, organizational learning, strategic leadership and social activity theories to develop a model and propositions which are then explored empirically and refined via longitudinal, embedded case studies of six key growth initiatives undertaken by a global professional services company over five years. The resulting insights illustrate that an integrated perspective that brings the trinity of the ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘what’ dimensions of sustained profitable growth together can explain how this ambition can be realized, and so present important implications for research and management practice. Hopefully, the Growth Leadership as Practice model, methodology and tools proposed in this study will contribute to increasing interdisciplinary and social action focused research, and to advancing practices that can tackle the growth problems many organizations face today