Energy in groups is often contagious and there was an abundance of it at Inc Magazine’s GrowCo conference last month in Nashville.

If one had any doubts about the state of the American entrepreneurial spirit, those are quashed this week as founders and start-up executives descended on Nashville at Inc’s annual confab.

A few issues were noticeable to me. Here are my top-3:

1. Management disciplines don’t get enough credit
   OK, frankly basic management is something of a boring topic when reduced to its academic foundations… Rockstar CEOs on the other hand are revered without deeper dives into their management techniques – maybe too much so.
2. Innovation is seen as hit or miss or luck.
   There’s not enough digging into the decisions made by founders and then showcasing where those founders were quite intentional and well-reasoned in their decisions.
3. Scaling processes and scaling the team is critical to scaling growth… but largely left out of the conversation.
   Now, if you were paying close attention, Papa Johns CEO touched on it in his interview: “Whatever gets, measured gets done. Whatever gets rewarded, gets repeated.” He’s actually talking about scale gained by measurement of KPIs and replication (also scale) caused by a reward system that incentivizes it.

• Jun-10-2014
• CEO,Management,startups