They call organic growth the "toughest management challenge," and I’m inclined to agree. It’s the acid test, the crucible where real, adaptable leadership is forged, or where, quite frankly, its limitations are starkly revealed. It’s a different beast entirely from managing a well-oiled, acquired business, and mistaking competence in one for automatic success in the other is a common, and often costly, error.

Let me paint you a picture. Imagine a manager, let’s call her Susan. Susan is sharp, diligent, and has a fantastic track record. We acquire a vertical market software business – solid, if a little sleepy, with a loyal customer base and decent, though unexciting, cash flow. Susan is put in charge. She rolls up her sleeves, streamlines processes, trims a bit of fat (sensibly, not savagely), improves customer support, and perhaps even negotiates better terms with a supplier or two. Within a couple of years, margins are up, customer churn is down, and the business is a model of quiet efficiency. We all pat Susan on the back, and rightly so. She’s done a stellar job of polishing an existing gem.

Then comes the next step. Susan, flush with success and our praise, is tasked with something new: spearheading an organic growth initiative. Perhaps it’s launching a new product line adjacent to her current market, or maybe even tackling an entirely new, albeit related, vertical. The expectation, often unspoken, is that her previous success will naturally translate.

And this is where the trouble often begins. Susan, quite logically, tries to apply the playbook that worked so well before. She looks for efficiencies, for established processes to optimize, for existing customer relationships to leverage. But in the wilderness of organic growth, there are no well-trodden paths. There’s no established customer base clamouring for this new, unproven thing. The market feedback loop is long, noisy, and often brutally indifferent. The skills that made her a brilliant custodian and incremental improver – meticulous attention to existing detail, operational tightening – are not the primary ones needed to navigate the fog of uncertainty that shrouds a new venture.

What’s required here is something else: an almost fanatical customer discovery process, a willingness to experiment (and fail, and learn, and iterate rapidly), an ability to inspire a small, perhaps slightly unconventional team to chase a vision that’s still hazy, and, critically, what I’ve often referred to as an "earned secret." This is that deep, non-obvious insight into a market or a customer pain point that gives a new venture its initial, crucial edge. It's not something you typically find in a well-run, mature business; it's dug out of the trenches of direct, often frustrating, market engagement.

Susan might find herself struggling. Timelines stretch. Budgets get re-evaluated. The crisp, predictable metrics she was used to in her previous role are replaced by ambiguous signals and educated guesses. It’s not that Susan has suddenly become incompetent. Far from it. Her skills in running a mature VMS business are still immensely valuable. But in this new arena, she’s encountering the limits of her current toolkit. It's a classic case of the Peter Principle, but with a twist: she hasn't been promoted beyond her competence in her original field, but rather, thrust into a different field that demands a different set of competencies, ones she may not have had the opportunity or inclination to develop.

It’s a bit like understanding classical mechanics versus quantum physics. Both are physics, but the rules and intuitive leaps are worlds apart. Someone brilliant at calculating the trajectory of a cannonball might be utterly lost when faced with wave-particle duality. It doesn’t make them a bad physicist; it just means they’re in a different part of the forest, and their old map is no longer reliable.

I remember my early days, long before software, doing all sorts of manual jobs. One week you might be cleaning out vats at a bakery – a repetitive, physically demanding task where efficiency came from rhythm and brute force. The next, you might be assisting a tradesman who had to creatively solve a unique problem on a new site every day. The mindset, the problem-solving approach, was entirely different. Competence in one didn't guarantee competence in the other, though a willingness to learn and adapt certainly helped.

The peril of premature praise, or more accurately, misattributed praise, is that we can set good people up for a fall. We see success in one domain and, in our eagerness for more of the same, assume that success is an intrinsic, transferable quality, like a universal solvent. It rarely is. Organic growth is a specialist’s game, or at least, it requires a specialist’s mindset. It demands a high tolerance for ambiguity, a detective's curiosity, and an inventor's resilience.

So, when we see a manager who has excelled in the stable world of an acquired business stumble when faced with the wild frontier of organic growth, we shouldn't be too quick to judge their overall ability. Instead, we should ask ourselves if we've put the right person, with the right tools and the right kind of experience, in the right place. Organic growth isn't just "acquisitions, but harder." It's a fundamentally different discipline. And recognizing that difference is the first, and perhaps most crucial, step in actually achieving it.