You can Google the topic and likely find 10 pages of results, all with varying opinions and perspectives on what drives growth, performance, brand leadership. I’m sharing my perspective on what I’ve seen and believe to be some of the critical factors that can drive corporate performance:

• Be RDB: Your products and services need to be relevant, different and better (RDB) than what your competitors offer. If you’re not offering something better than others, you can only compete on price. Being relevant, different and better means prioritizing brand management over sales management.
• Internal Advocacy: Your employees need to understand and believe in the company and its vision, commit to it, and become advocates on its behalf. Employee attitudes and behaviors dramatically affect customer acquisition and retention.
• Customer Experience: You need to have a relentless commitment to customer service and empower everyone in the organization to deliver the best experiences possible. Customers want their problems solved quickly and don’t care about your processes. All employees need to know that they can act with speed, certainty and simplicity for their customers.
• Employee Experience: You need to have the same relentless commitment to making ensuring that all of your employees feel they belong, and can become more of who they were meant to be, within your organization. Employees need to know that they can anchor their life, career and future with you.
• Prioritize and Fund: You need to commit appropriate resources around 3-5 core initiatives that will drive revenue, reduce expenses and improve processes. Eliminate any project that steals time and resources from those initiatives.
• Eliminate: You need to remove leaders from the organization who don’t have the skill or will to unlearn what they know, challenge status quo or break conventional wisdom; their only goal is to minimize their risk, look good and survive.
• Take Chances: You need to encourage risk-taking and accept that all things won’t work as planned. I worked for a CEO who said he’d rather end the year with 12 wins and 4 losses, than 2 wins and 0 losses. Exactly.
• Invest: You can’t fuel growth or brand leadership by operating bare-bones. You need to commit money towards research, marketing, operational excellence and other vital components of growth.
• Pulse-Check: You need to keep abreast of the shifting patterns in customer buying habits and competitive responses. You may be relevant, different and better one day … and have excellent customer experiences, too … but you’re in a fluid, rapidly-changing economy.
• Become Obsolete: You should develop a plan to put your company out of business. It’s not a bad idea to routinely gather the good thinkers in your organization and ask them to design a company from scratch that would put your company out of business; it encourages innovation, entrepreneurism and a customer-first mindset.