While growth is a top priority for companies of all sizes, it can be extremely difficult to create and maintain—especially in today’s competitive business environment. The Granularity of Growth will put you in a better position to succeed as it reveals why growth is so important, what enables certain companies to grow so spectacularly, and how to ensure that growth comes from multiple sources as you take both a broad and a granular view of your markets.
Growth is high on the agenda of companies around the world today. This book, based on several years of new research by the world's leading management consultants McKinsey & Company, presents powerful new insights into sustained profitable growth.
Growth unleashes benefits beyond the economic. It revitalizes organizations and invigorates the people in them, creating energy, a sense of purpose, and the glow of being on a winning team. Like the alchemy of old, it seeks to transform the everyday into the exalted by means that seem little short of magical. Yet growth is often elusive, achieved at unacceptable costs, or managed in fits and starts. Based on over three years of research and application at high-performing companies around the world, The Alchemy of Growth is a comprehensive, practical approach to initiating, achieving, and sustaining profitable growth—today and tomorrow. As the book shows, the secret is to manage business opportunities across three time horizons at once: extending and defending core businesses, building new businesses, and seeding options for the future. The Alchemy of Growth offers managers at all levels the tools and concepts for investing in the right initiatives, capabilities, and talent to propel their companies into the future.
Beat the odds with a bold strategy from McKinsey & Company "Every once in a while, a genuinely fresh approach to business strategy appears" —legendary business professor Richard Rumelt, UCLA McKinsey & Company's newest, most definitive, and most irreverent book on strategy—which thousands of executives are already using—is a must-read for all C-suite executives looking to create winning corporate strategies. Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick is spearheading an empirical revolution in the field of strategy. Based on an extensive analysis of the key factors that drove the long-term performance of thousands of global companies, the book offers a ground-breaking formula that enables you to objectively assess your strategy's real odds of future success. "This book is fundamental. The principles laid out here, with compelling data, are a great way around the social pitfalls in strategy development." —Frans Van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips N.V. The authors have discovered that over a 10-year period, just 1 in 12 companies manage to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company's current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to give it the strongest chance of vaulting over the competition. This is not another strategy framework. Rather, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick shows, through empirical analysis and the experiences of dozens of companies that have successfully made multiple big moves, that to dramatically improve performance, you have to overcome incrementalism and corporate inertia. "A different kind of book—I couldn't put it down. Inspiring new insights on the facts of what it takes to move a company's performance, combined with practical advice on how to deal with real-life dynamics in management teams." —Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup Latin America
“When it comes to growing revenues, not all dollars are equal.” In company after company that Sanjay Khosla and Mohanbir Sawhney worked for or researched, they saw businesses taking on more products, more markets, more people, more acquisitions—adding more of everything except what really mattered: sustainable and profitable growth. And in many of these companies — large or small, from America to Europe to Asia — every quarter became a mad dash to find yet another short-term revenue boost. There had to be a better way — an alternative to the scramble for mindless expansion. The answer lies in Fewer, Bigger, Bolder, a market-proven, step-by-step program to achieve sustained growth with rising profits and lower costs. The authors prove that given the right incentives, managers using this program can produce astonishing results in amazingly short time frames. That’s exactly what Khosla accomplished as President of Kraft’s developing markets, which enjoyed eye-popping revenue growth from $5 billion to $16 billion in just six years, while profitability increased 50%. Sawhney, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, discovered a similar formula for stellar results when advising a portfolio of businesses, from Fortune 500 giants to technology start-ups. No matter how big the company or how difficult the economic environment, managers who use this seven-step program (“Focus7”) will learn how to make fewer but bigger bets and to create a virtuous cycle of growth. Fewer, Bigger, Bolder crosses the usual boundaries of strategy, execution, people and organization. Its framework shows how you can drive growth by targeting resources against priorities, simplifying your operations, and unleashing the potential of your people. By challenging the conventional wisdom about growth, Fewer, Bigger, Bolder is likely to ignite a vigorous debate throughout the business community. It’s a game-changing book that couldn’t be more timely. Or more needed.
Achieving economic growth is one of today's key challenges. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Best argues that to understand how successful growth happens we need an economic framework that focuses on production, governance, and skills. This production-centric framework is the culmination of three simultaneous journeys. The first has been Best's visits to hundreds of factories worldwide, starting early as the son of a labor organiser and continuing through his work as an academic and industrial consultant. The second is a survey of two hundred years of economic thought from Babbage to Krugman, with stops along the way for Marx, Marshall, Young, Penrose, Richardson, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Abramovitz, Keynes, and Jacobs. The third is a tour of historical episodes of successful and failed transformations, focusing sharply on three core elements -- the production system, business organisation, and skill formation -- and their interconnections. Best makes the case that government should create the institutional infrastructures needed to support these elements and their interconnections rather than subsidise individual enterprises.
A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.
"Hidalgo has made a bold attempt to synthesize a large body of cutting-edge work into a readable, slender volume. This is the future of growth theory." -- Financial Times What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's antidisciplinarian Cér Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order. At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order-or information-disappears. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Although cities are all pockets where information grows, they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish little more than pulling rocks out of the ground. So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil's, and Brazil's that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston's Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information. Seen from Hidalgo's vantage, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows lays bear the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do not just more things, but more interesting things.
Offers a look at the power of collaboration, defining eight archetypes of leaders and followers and then explaining how readers can take different cases of successful collective behavior and apply them to their own organizations.
To thrive in a world where networks of companies increasingly compete with other networks, managers can no longer focus solely on excellence in planning and execution. In The Spider’s Strategy, top business consultant Amit S. Mukherjee provides the tools you need to sense and respond to unexpected events. He shows why and how managers in your company must apply four powerful “Design Principles” today: Change everyday work practices by embedding “sense and response” within your normal plan-and-execute processes. Promote collaboration across partner companies by establishing practical mechanisms that make “win-win” a basis for action not an empty slogan. Ensure that work really teaches by assuring the culture, processes, and organizational structure to improve your company’s ability to learn. Implement those key technological capabilities that allow the network to function seamlessly. The heart of this book includes proven implementation advice based on conversations with successful innovators at HP, Nokia, and beyond. Mukherjee offers new insight into everything from work practices to culture and corporate organization and shows how to overcome even the most stubborn obstacles to effective collaboration amongst partners.
