What it means to be one global team

What was your favorite experience with grow global? And why?

Estella: Our set-up in the USA is different than in China or Brazil for example. We do not have a large team. It is extremely lean. Especially in the last six months, when I worked from home, I sometimes felt like a lonely island all to myself.

But I always knew that I could pick up the phone (or schedule a meeting) and call someone. As part of the grow family, we make sure that physical distance does not mean that there is working distance.

My favourite moment was the kick-off meeting, where we could finally meet and work on our common vision for this organisation. It was hard work, but the moment when we came together from all the separate initiatives to set a common goal was special. My favourite moment was jointly defining our vision, mission and purpose. For an organsiation to thrive, everyone within that organization has to believe in the vision, mission and the purpose.

What in your opinion has changed in the regions and worldwide since we became one team?

Andrew: The biggest turning point was when we first introduced the grow global strategy. Before that, the why, how and what was unclear and not targeted. Now the strategy leads us like a lighthouse. Without a clear strategy, things like a shared vision or cross-regional collaboration are hard to establish.

In this case, everyone is doing something, but we do not fully understand what the others are doing and what their objectives are. Luckily, the first thing we worked out as a global team was the grow global strategy.

Now we really work as one team: we have full transparency about the activities of each region, we support start-ups globally and we carefully select future start-ups to join the grow community. To do this, we make a joint evaluation worldwide so that all agree on which future unicorns grow should fund.

This level of cooperation is only possible where everyone has a very clear understanding of the strategy.

What do you think we can achieve together as one grow?

Jochen: To be ahead of innovations: Stick to your strength! We must leverage expertise from the different innovation hubs and make it accessible for everyone. To find the right topics for innovation, we have to identify or generate high-quality start-ups.

There are still many synergies to be drawn from this aspect. We need to play with ecosystems and use their speed and external partners, whether they are in Singapore or North America, to achieve faster market entry and identify crucial unmet needs with a business potential.

Experts are required, such as strategists or business developers, to make the most of our resources. We together have to understand what we want to achieve in order to create synergies. This has been done well with the new strategy and its implementation so that the hubs are striving to a common dream.