Growth Isn’t a Department. It’s a Way of Working.

The Mirage of the “Growth Department”

Many organizations across Asia—and indeed, worldwide—continue to treat growth as a siloed function, placing the burden of expansion on a singular team or business unit. This is especially pronounced in rapid-growth hubs like Singapore and Jakarta, where management teams create dedicated “growth” departments, expecting innovation, customer acquisition, and revenue leaps to emanate solely from their efforts. But pursuing growth as if it can be isolated in a department is like expecting a single tree to turn a barren landscape green. True, sustainable growth seeps into every part of an organization’s DNA.

Strategy Is Coordination, Not Slogans

The noted corporate strategist Richard Rumelt reminds us that good strategy is not about broad ambitions or rousing slogans; it is about tackling a meaningful, often uncomfortable problem with coordinated action. In growth, this means dissolving artificial boundaries—between marketing and operations, technology and sales, headquarters and field—so that discovery, learning, and adaptation happen everywhere.

Consider a regional bank in Vietnam that, rather than allocating customer onboarding to a digital team, embedded customer-centric metrics into every branch’s daily operations. The results eclipsed the effects of previous standalone “innovation” projects, not because of a new technology, but because every employee saw themselves as part of the bank’s growth engine.

Growth Pain Points: Beyond Surface Solutions

When leaders treat growth as a departmental mandate, they often create measurable targets—quarterly sales increases, app downloads, or market launches—without addressing underlying constraints. In Mumbai, a consumer electronics brand learned this lesson the hard way. Sales stagnated despite bold targets and lavish marketing budgets managed by a specialist team. The breakthrough didn’t come from more campaigns, but from revamping the supply chain and fielding mobile service units—actions driven by logistics, service, and retail staff who previously felt growth was “not their job.” Removing bottlenecks was everyone’s business, and only then did the growth numbers reflect ambition.

Learning Everywhere: The Power of Local Insight

In pan-Asian organizations, frontline staff are closest to the pulse of customers. Yet, growth strategies are too often drafted in headquarters and relayed down the line. In Thailand, a family-owned food conglomerate transformed how it thought about innovation by creating rotating cross-functional teams, mixing production operators with R&D and commercial leads. This team reimagined product formats to fit new convenience store realities, sparking a 20% increase in product uptake in urban centers—all without a central “growth project.”

Risk-Taking as a Routine, Not an Exception

Companies aiming for breakthrough growth often look to create isolated “disruptive” teams—hoping a lab, a venture arm, or a digital incubator will solve for inertia elsewhere. But as Rumelt teaches, effective strategy is less about wishing and more about orchestrating systemic change. A Singaporean logistics player, facing threats from global entrants, moved risk-taking into the mainstream. Rather than limiting experimentation to a lab, teams across operations, finance, and customer service piloted small, reversible bets, flattening internal hierarchies and rewarding quick learning from failures. Their new logistics products didn’t come from a flash of departmental genius, but from a thousand adjustments across their business.

Growth as a Company’s Operating System

What ties these stories together is the insight that growth, rightly done, is much more than a numerical target or quarterly campaign. It is a way of working: a habit of systematically diagnosing constraints, empowering teams to act, and continually aligning activities with genuine market needs. This is a strategic process, not a project—one that demands clarity of focus and the willingness to challenge organizational orthodoxy. In Rumelt’s terms, operating this way means constantly asking: “What’s the real problem, and what coordinated action will move the needle?”

Five Habits of Growth-Oriented Organizations

1. Clarity before action: Diagnose the real barriers to growth before launching initiatives.

2. Empower at the edge: Give frontline teams authority to experiment and report lessons.

3. Institutionalize learning: Turn failures into institutional knowledge, not scapegoats.

4. Align incentives: Make growth everyone’s job by hardwiring it into rewards and recognition.

5. Cross-pollinate solutions: Facilitate ongoing dialogue between different functions and markets.

A Call to Action: Shift Your Growth Mindset

If you’re leading an enterprise in Asia, the question is not whether you have a growth department, but whether your whole organization behaves as a growth engine. Are you diagnosing problems rigorously? Are experiments and learnings embraced company-wide, not just in an “innovation” silo? The evidence is clear: growth flourishes when it becomes a way of working—democratized, disciplined, and continuous.

Let’s reimagine growth. If you seek practical strategies—not just slogans—to embed growth into your company’s operating system, get in touch. At Sage & Saga, we partner with ambitious teams across Asia to build the habits and mechanisms that sustain real progress. Growth awaits—if you’re ready to make it everyone’s business.