The pressure to grow is relentless. The environment is not helping. Tariff disruption, volatile consumer confidence, and AI are reshaping purchasing behavior faster than most organizations can absorb. But we are beginning to see a clearer picture of how we will overcome this period and emerge victorious. Technology can accelerate almost anything, but sustainable growth belongs to companies that treat trusted relationships as their most defensible competitive asset.
That was the thread that was flowing chief executive2026 Growth Summit to be held in Nashville. Here are some of the things the participants took home.
The product needs to get marketing.
Fix what's actually broken before you spend your time telling someone about it. Domino's Pizza CEO Russell Weiner spent two years reinventing the pizza recipe before launching his famous turnaround campaign. The reason for that ordering is not patience, but survival. Good marketing accelerates the spread of bad products. Weiner's example: Oldsmobile's “It's Not Your Dad's Car” campaign failed because the product was still your father's car.
“When you try to fix something, you need two things: what the problem is, how to fix it, and how to send the message,” he says. “Nothing kills a new product or new idea like good marketing. If the new product is bad and the marketing is good, everyone will hear and see it. Give that bad idea a try.”
Find the tension your brand can actually break through.
Tension is a real, coiled discomfort waiting to be released in your brand, your customers’ lives, or your broader culture. When you find the right one and your brand solves it, your message is inherently amplified. In 2010, Domino's Pizza's brand tension (bad pizza) coincided with a cultural moment when no one trusted the organization to be honest with them.
A pizza company broke both tensions at the same time by admitting that its product was bad and publicly fixing it. Weiner estimated that for every dollar they spent, they were worth $15 in media earned. It's not the concept that's difficult. It's a search. “There are as many tensions as there are blades of grass on a football field,” he says, and consumer research is a way to find out what your brand can actually own.
“When you find the right tension, you get nervous,” he says. “And that's the point. When brainstorming started to get scary, I knew I was onto something.”
You're designing your customer experience around the wrong KPIs.
Lior Arussy, founder of Strativity Group, reframed the growth question into a simple challenge. If you have a customer who will pay you $50,000 this year, but that same customer is worth $1.5 million over their lifetime, which customer are you designing for?
He argued that most companies are designing for the $50,000 version. His work with Mercedes-Benz, FedEx, and others all followed the same logic. So start with lifetime value, work backwards, and redesign your engagement model to capture it.
“The question most of my clients had was, ‘What is the best and most innovative production model to create a profitable product?’” What you are not asking is, “What is the most innovative engagement model to create profitable customer lifetime value and work backwards from there?”
“The margins are in the memories.”
Pricing power does not reside in the product, but in the emotional experience surrounding it. Alssie made its case with Disney figures that cost 5 cents to make and sold for $9.95. It's not a plastic margin. That's memory space. Customers who feel uninterested in the interaction will negotiate the price. Customers who feel something are not.
“At Mercedes-Benz, we transformed our entire network to sell emotion rather than function. That was our ability to triple profitability in a highly competitive industry.”
When the world feels uncertain, customers buy trust, not features.
Kelly Goldsmith, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Management at Vanderbilt's Owen School of Business, echoed Alci's sentiments. In moments of high uncertainty, she says, consumers stop making analytical decisions and start relying on their gut feelings. The emotion that brings the highest returns is trust. That means brand building and consistency are more important, not less, right now.
“When the world feels uncertain, consumers are less likely to rely on facts and figures to make decisions. What consumers are more likely to trust is how you make them feel. And that emotion that produces the highest ROI is trust.”
Demographic segmentation is a trap, but value-based segmentation is the key.
Mr. Goldsmith experienced a consistent pattern of marketing failures that had one root cause. That meant they were targeting people who looked like hypothetical customers, rather than people who shared the value the product actually provided. Gatorade Light was designed for women, but the real competition was free tap water. The target audience was concerned about hydration, not calories. Swiffer was a huge failure in Italy. That's because the product suggested convenience, and convenience meant “not very clean” for Italian households.
The question is not who looks like the customer. It's about what job they're hiring your product for. “Don't let your marketing team tell you their core customer is '24 to 35-year-old women living in a metropolitan area.' They need to understand what their customers value.”
If your employees aren't owning their efforts, start by looking in the mirror.
Kelly Siggins has grown StoneAge, a Colorado-based manufacturer of high-pressure water blasting tools, more than tenfold in 20 years. The solution was not a strategy. It was her realization that her own leadership style stifled the ownership culture she was trying to build.
Within a few months, people started speaking out as she transitioned from “driving, driving, driving” to what she calls cool, calm, and collected behavior. The culture changed not because she forced it, but because she stopped preventing it.
“If no one in your organization owns it, you need to think about why. How do you lead? How do you create the conditions for ownership to exist? Because if I hadn't changed, a lot of these things wouldn't have happened. I would have unintentionally stifled people's creativity and their willingness to speak up.”
Implicit expectations are an illusion.
After a management meeting broke up in a turf war between departments, Mr. Siggins went home and wrote down the management's operating principles, not as a personnel exercise but as a CEO accountability document. This became the basis for an annual 360-degree live review and dispute resolution touchstone.
“Unspoken expectations are an illusion,” she said. “If you haven't clearly explained how people will show up and they don't agree with your expectations, it's just your expectations, not reality.”
AI is reshaping buyers before sellers are involved.
Tiffany Bova, Chief Strategy and Research Officer, Futurum, Author growth IQclaimed that the funnel has fundamentally changed. With up to 94% of buyers now using AI in the buying process, a company's online presence and positioning is making the sale before any human intervention.
Meanwhile, half of all salespeople fail to meet their quota for the year, and only spend about 40% of their time actually selling. Most growth stalls are not caused by market conditions, but by internal inertia. “It requires rigor in marketing, R&D, and partnerships, which rarely happens in sales. Do we have the right people on the right accounts, with the right compensation plan, the right capabilities, and the right support?”
The people in your company who are leveraging AI the most are probably invisible to you.
Mark Sarkin, Walk West's chief growth officer, described what he calls “jagged edges.” In every organization today, some employees are using AI to quietly re-engineer workflows, building real-world applications or automating processes, while others haven't touched the technology for months. These radical companies are not categorized by title or technical background. They run based on curiosity.
Sirkin explained that an event manager with no coding experience built a set of working production applications in three months on his own time, without permission or an IT department. The leader had no such idea. “AI is not evenly spaced on an organizational chart. It doesn't exist in IT departments, marketing departments, sales departments, etc. AI operates based on things like curiosity and a desire to experiment,” he said. “We have people on the same team, under the same manager, rebuilding workflows with people who haven’t touched AI in months.”
Find your “bridge”.
Linda Hill, a professor at Harvard Business School who has spent decades studying how organizations actually scale innovation, has argued that every company needs three types of leadership to turn innovative ideas into reality. They are architects who build cultures of iterative innovation, catalysts who build ecosystems across sectors and communities, and bridges who work across internal and external boundaries to bring in capabilities that are not internal.
This is why Delta's biometric boarding passes exist. Someone within the company had to convince a skeptical IT department to connect the startup to Delta's systems and work with the TSA and government agencies to legalize it. That person was not a senior executive. She had a wide internal network, a zigzag career, and was someone who didn't need to take credit for anything.
Hill says Bridger will be the most important asset for any company looking to grow and expand in an increasingly fast-paced and complex era. “Seriously question your assumptions about who is likely to lead you into the future,” she said. “There are some really unusual suspects and they are people who can help us get there.”
