Do you remember playing Tag as a child? One kid is it, chases everyone else, and taps whoever cannot get away. That person becomes it, and off the chase goes again.

Great fun when you are eight. Considerably less fun when you are running a business and it starts to feel like the same game. This market expansion strategy. That innovation push. This acquisition. That AI solution. One it after another, and the chase never quite ends.

None of those efforts are bad ideas. The trouble is that seven to nine out of ten of them fail, and that figure has barely shifted in decades no matter the industry, the strategy, or the enablement behind it.

Where the Energy Leaks Out

If the failure rate were about strategy quality, you would expect it to improve as our strategic tools got better. It has not. So I went looking for what the usual approach to growth is missing, and I keep arriving at the same answer, which is integration.

Integration is a familiar word and I think it is doing much less work in most companies than people assume. It is entirely possible, and quite common, for an integration initiative itself to be designed in a disintegrated way.

Here is the version I have watched play out more than once. A company buys a smaller competitor for its technology. The deal team models the synergies, sets the targets, and hands the thing off. Integration becomes a checklist: consolidate the systems, cut the redundant roles, hit the cost numbers. Two years later the technology works exactly as promised. The people who understood it have gone, the customers they served feel orphaned, and the acquired team’s particular way of solving problems, which was the thing that made the technology valuable in the first place, has evaporated. The spreadsheet says the deal closed successfully. The value walked out of the building.

The Alternative

Integrated Growth is the insightful and daily integration of human excellence, meaning creativity, judgment, synergistic relationships and the drive to build something bigger than oneself, with material affordances, meaning the finances, technologies, natural resources, infrastructure and other assets that make and sustain things of value in the world.

Growing a business is a daily ground game. Weave those two together, wisely and repeatedly, around a shared Core of what the business is genuinely about, and three things start to compound. The business grows. The people find new value worth investing themselves in. And the economy they share gets stronger, with each round of growth revealing the next one.

When I say the economy they share, I mean the real one that businesses trade in every day. Employees, customers, suppliers, partners, influencers, and the local, national and international markets where they compete. The gains land in those relationships as contracts renewed, talent retained, and customers and employees who like what is happening enough to become your natural salesforce, which in my experience is one of the surest signs that a company is positioned to grow.

The Leaders Who Already Do This

If that sounds too good to be true, I would say it is rare rather than mythical. It is rare because what goes on inside companies and networks that keep growing has, until recently, lived almost entirely as the intuitive knowledge of a particular group of leaders. I call them Integrated Growth Leaders.

Ask them how they do it and they will do their best. They will give you three reasons, or you will read a book with five secrets, and there is always more to it than that. Sometimes their moves are astonishingly simple. Sometimes they involve connecting dots nobody else had noticed, and then helping other people connect those same dots so that they own the insight rather than borrowing it.

Writing the System Down

Between the school of hard knocks and years spent alongside dozens of leaders with excellent instincts who could not quite tell me why, when and how some growth efforts worked and others did not, I have been able to surface the system underneath. Not a model and not a checklist. A system, with inputs, throughputs, interactions, outputs, feedback, and the other elements and dynamics named and made usable.

One of the most encouraging things we found is that most of the inputs and the potential interactions for growth, the assets and the opportunities, are already right under our feet or just around the corner. Missing those close but hidden things is what most often torpedoes an effort to grow.

Think about that for a moment. Businesses already have most of what they need inside their own networks to integrate, innovate and grow to a new level. Those assets are overlooked, dampened by process, fixed mindsets and cultural habit. They are disintegrated from one another. The work of the Third Angle Integrated Growth System is to surface these Hidden Treasures, integrate them, and turn wasted potential into value.

Spreading the Energy

In the game of business growth, when you apply TAIGS™ you are still it. The difference is that you learn how to spread the energy, so that growth becomes the business of many players at once instead of your personal initiative to carry.

You stop running around after disconnected pieces of the business hoping to catch the right one. You and your team become the strategic orchestrators, using both formal and informal power, weaving human excellence and material affordances together daily and throughout the whole life of a project.

It is a game you can win, and help others win, if you are willing to learn the system and to grow while you are learning it.

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