Alignment, Focus and Executing on What Matters Most

At a recent panel discussion hosted by Fogarty Innovation, Tracy MacNeal (Materna Medical), Karen Tax (IAMX) and Mike Hogan (Insights7) shared Materna’s path to corporate value and the approach that MacNeal said, in retrospect, would have saved them 1-2 years and $10 million if implemented earlier.

Fogarty is an important educational nonprofit in Silicon Valley that supports entrepreneurship in the medtech space.  Their mission is clear and exciting:

We advance human health worldwide by incubating companies, educating stakeholders, and bringing innovators, industry, and government together to strengthen the startup medtech ecosystem.”

So it was a special honor that they invited this trio to share their insights and experience. Here’s some background on each:

Materna is a novel OBGYN platform company that is defining a $6B market in the most common pelvic conditions women face.  It’s novel because this had been a segment with little fresh research or solutions in prior decades. Materna is changing that. They launched a direct-to-consumer product in 2019 and have a second product in clinical trials that targets pelvic muscle injuries in childbirth.

Their mission is unique but Materna faces many of the same challenges as any startup. They have a lot of pressure to perform against the hurdles that come with each stage of their funding. Their teams are distributed and all wear multiple hats. Because their two products have different external customers, leveraging their production, compliance and go-to-market systems can be extremely challenging when not managed intentionally and systematically. It’s fast paced and high stress.  As Tracy described their journey, it became clear how IAMX and Insights7 have each played a critical supporting role in the success of Materna over the past year.

Insights7 is an agile strategy execution platform.  It provides the context that enables companies like Materna to understand and explicitly define target value so operations are always aligned to meeting or exceeding target value. Corporate value is often seen purely through a financial lens. But when strategic and operational focus shifts from “doing work” to “creating value,” then the role of every person becomes clear and measurable. This helps grow relationship value with customers, employees, suppliers, community, board, shareholders. When these are balanced, financial health is a natural by-product.

The Insights7 and IAMX systems strive to help organizations continually increase their “value creation capacity.” IAMX focuses on helping individuals unlock and access the power of their “best self,” especially during challenging times. The value creation potential of the team grows exponentially as team members get better at tapping into their “best selves”. However, without the value creation structure and system provided by Insights7, this potential can’t be fully leveraged. Insights7 ensures that IAMX-empowered teams realize their full value creation potential by aligning their work with explicitly defined value targets.This integrated system elevates teams from a task-centric “get stuff done” mindset to a Value Creator mindset where the focus is “getting the right stuff done right”.

As MacNeal puts it, Materna uses the Insights7 Platform as “the place everyone goes to see what is most important right now, how we are performing against our target value metrics, and the work we have prioritized for the week as giving us the best chance to grow our target value.” The focus is both steady-state work and stretch goals, the latter supporting the design and deployment of strategic initiatives for improvement and innovation. The platform creates the context for better, faster decision making that optimizes value creation.

Materna used the IAMX Compass, via coaching and mindfulness practices, to cultivate a culture of continuous learning and to develop employees’ “Value Creator” mindset. The IAMX methodology addresses the stress, the “drama,” that inevitably occurs when people need to work together under pressure to deliver on challenges such as those faced by Materna. The IAMX Define Your True Self course guides individuals and teams to deal with the drama by seeing it as a signal, a catalyst for learning. Arming team members with the IAMX skills helps them come to know their True Self, getting control of their life, career, and future. These skills help them bring their Best Self to their teams, developing skills to do their work and collaborate with their colleagues in the most productive way for all. The goal is to create whole person leadership that balances team well-being while achieving results. It’s about creating a sustainable, high-performing culture.

MacNeal explained that the IAMX-Insights7 collaboration has increased Materna’s alignment and focus. It has enabled their team to execute on what matters most for building corporate value. In other words, it has greatly expanded their “value creation capacity.” She explained that the Value Creator mindset is critical for any team of five or more people, a point at which work becomes too complicated for everyone to have shared understanding of the big picture and important strategic information in their heads. Using this approach at Materna, she asserted, has helped team members become empowered Value Creators, working as strong links in their internal value chain to accelerate time to maximum corporate value.

Want to explore how IAMX and Insights7 could help your team enjoy results like these? Please find a good time for us to chat further!