Featuring David Gau, chief operating officer and head of operations at Pritzker Private Capital, and Carter Cast, a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Complimentary HBR Video Webinar
Monday, October 23, 12:00 pm ET
Companies get mired in translating ambitious goals and transformative strategies into executable actions.
Take a 95-year-old industrial company that had been growing at a low-single-digit rate when a new leader challenged his team to accelerate growth—specifically to raise EBITDA from 15% to 20% over five years.
His team’s pushback was swift. They doubted such a goal could be accomplished and believed their value proposition had been maxed out.
Undeterred, this leader challenged his team to dissect the profit and loss statement (P&L) to identify how they might achieve this goal by setting “big, hairy, audacious goals” around key areas of the financial statement—revenues, margins, operating expenses—and then further breaking down those goals.
David Gau and Carter Cast call this process “the aspirational P&L,” which they introduce in their recent HBR article Why Your Organization Needs an Aspirational P&L.
In this interactive HBR webinar, Gau and Cast:
- Described what an aspirational P&L is
- Provided a framework for creating an aspirational P&L
- Showed how this framework can help executives manage projects and lead change-management initiatives
- Shared practical examples of how this framework helps optimize the profit equation
This approach is highly relevant, given today’s pressures on profitability, including rising inflation, ongoing supply chain disruptions, and a tight labor market. This framework shifts the focus away from an overall profit target to identifying specific levers that lead to improvements in growth and revenue.
