This is the first Zoom session in the develop phase of the 2025 IRG100 program, run with the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative. Its subject is grounding, and the session splits into two halves: why roots and heritage matter, and how to work with them.
Grounding is treated as the first of the drivers of humanized growth, and the session distinguishes internal grounding from external grounding.
Key findings
- The case for heritage is that it is the basis for everything and a unique advantage. Because it cannot be copied, it supports community forming, growth focus, credible innovation, and partnerships built on shared beliefs.
- The commercial argument rests on the shift of business value into intangibles, cited from the Ocean Tomo Intangible Asset Market Value Study 2020 as a move from 17 percent to 90 percent.
- Grounding is meant to hold across all stakeholders: colleagues, customers, community, and capital markets.
- The opportunity gap the session points to is on living by the same values, shown as 50 percent against 75 percent.
What a leader is asked to do with the past
The leadership implications are set out as a sequence. Reconnect with the origins. Celebrate the past. Acknowledge the past, which is not the same as celebrating it. Then future-proof the heritage, shown as a line running from 1959 to 2024.
The session frames this with a line about hindsight: you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.
The final step is to act differently, using the Da Vinci profile of behaviors and attitudes with purpose at the center. Purpose itself is framed through four questions: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can monetize.
The practitioner material
External grounding is illustrated with a healthcare stakeholder map covering Georgia and beyond, counting employees, affiliates, patients, applicants, boards, community leaders, donors, and joint ventures. It also lists specific needs including primary care, heart, oncology, neuro, orthopedics, delivery, and mental health.
The outside voices were Marcel Marcondes, CMO of AB InBev, Jade Strattner, managing director of the Yale Program for Stakeholder Innovation and Management, and Douwe Bergsma, CMO of Piedmont Healthcare.
The session ran to an agenda of introduction, a connect breakout, IRG learning, practitioner learning, a coached breakout, and a debrief, and closed by asking participants to write down their key take-outs and any actions for their plan.
Scope and limitations
The percentages appear on the slides as paired figures without a stated sample or a definition of the groups being compared. The only external source cited in the deck is the Ocean Tomo study.
Source
This page summarises Session 1: Roots & Heritage, by Institute for Real Growth, 2025-01-23.