Fit for Growth


Book Description

A practical approach to business transformation Fit for Growth* is a unique approach to business transformation that explicitly connects growth strategy with cost management and organization restructuring. Drawing on 70-plus years of strategy consulting experience and in-depth research, the experts at PwC’s Strategy& lay out a winning framework that helps CEOs and senior executives transform their organizations for sustainable, profitable growth. This approach gives structure to strategy while promoting lasting change. Examples from Strategy&’s hundreds of clients illustrate successful transformation on the ground, and illuminate how senior and middle managers are able to take ownership and even thrive during difficult periods of transition. Throughout the Fit for Growth process, the focus is on maintaining consistent high-value performance while enabling fundamental change. Strategy& has helped major clients around the globe achieve significant and sustained results with its research-backed approach to restructuring and cost reduction. This book provides practical guidance for leveraging that expertise to make the choices that allow companies to: Achieve growth while reducing costs Manage transformation and transition productively Create lasting competitive advantage Deliver reliable, high-value performance Sustainable success is founded on efficiency and high performance. Companies are always looking to do more with less, but their efforts often work against them in the long run. Total business transformation requires total buy-in, and it entails a series of decisions that must not be made lightly. The Fit for Growth approach provides a clear strategy and practical framework for growth-oriented change, with expert guidance on getting it right. *Fit for Growth is a registered service mark of PwC Strategy& Inc. in the United States




Growth Company


Book Description

As the focus of protest against a hated war in Vietnam it became one of the best-known company names in America almost overnight during the 1960s. "Dow makes napalm, napalm kills babies," chanted student protesters on hundreds of campuses during that war. "Dow shalt not kill." This feisty company did not back off from making napalm (it was the only U.S. company that did not), and it was soon embroiled in other front-page controversies--Agent Orange, dioxin, and mercury contamination of the Great Lakes among them. Typically, when EPA planes flew over its plants taking photos, Dow sued. Growth Company is the story of a century of industrial drama told by an insider who has been associated with the firm and its top managers since 1953. Written in celebration of the firm's 100th anniversary, it traces the rise of an archetypical growth company from its unlikely beginnings in a dying lumber town in the backwoods of central Michigan. Later a Wall Street favorite, it made many of its early investors wealthy; it has not missed or decreased a dividend since 1911. Based on research in the Dow corporate archives, supplemented by oral history interviews with more than 150 company pioneers, this colorful panorama of growth is told in terms of the people who built this unique and spectacularly successful world-class company, beginning with Herbert H. Dow, the young genius who founded the firm, down to the son of Greek immigrants who heads the company today.




Smart Growth


Book Description

A Wall Street Journal bestseller Named one of 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 by Thinkers50 Creating a culture of learning and growth. Growth is the goal. Helping people develop their potential—enabling them to articulate and become the self they want to be, are capable of being, and that best serves them and others in the short and long term—is what we as individuals and leaders strive toward. But how do we grow? It turns out it happens in a predictable way, which means we can understand where we are in our growth and chart a way forward. In this compact, complete guide, Whitney Johnson dives more deeply than ever into the S Curve of Learning so that you can envision how growth happens and direct yourself and others in your organization to create a culture that fosters it. The growth and learning journey comes in three phases: the Launch Point, the Sweet Spot, and Mastery. Compelling examples of successful people will show you when and why growth is slow, how to keep going, what to do when growth and learning are almost too fast to keep up with, and how to leap from one growth journey to another. As individuals grow, so do organizations and societies. Growth is learning put into action—action that betters the world as we better ourselves and our small niches, both personal and professional, within it. Growth occurs when learning is internalized—when we try something new and invest the effort to move it from being something we do to something we are.




High Growth Handbook


Book Description

High Growth Handbook is the playbook for growing your startup into a global brand. Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from small companies into global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, Gil has identified a set of common patterns and created an accessible playbook for scaling high-growth startups, which he has now codified in High Growth Handbook. In this definitive guide, Gil covers key topics, including: · The role of the CEO · Managing a board · Recruiting and overseeing an executive team · Mergers and acquisitions · Initial public offerings · Late-stage funding. Informed by interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal-clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups.




Built for Growth


Book Description

If there's one thing that's consistent in today's business world, it's rapid change. So how do you not only stay steady but actually grow'and quickly enough to stay safely ahead of your competitors? Built for Growth delivers specific solutions to create a brand and presence that generates true customer passion, as you lay a solid foundation for long-term success. Author Arthur Rubinfeld was a major driver in Starbucks' unprecedented retail expansion from 100 stores to more than 4000-- and its transformation into one of the world's most recognized brands. Here he draws on his singular expertise to present a proven, holistic approach to conceiving, designing, and executing your business plan: creating exciting concepts, growing them to fruition in local markets, expanding rapidly, and keeping your brand fresh and relevant as it matures. His revolutionary approach to business strategy embodies strong personal values, promotes exceptional creativity, leverages scientific methodology in finance and market analysis, and brings it all together with 'old-time' customer service.




The Startup Growth Book


Book Description

50+ Proven Ways to Scale Your Startup Without a Marketing Budget Marketing is consistently considered one of the main reasons that startups fail, and every year, tens of thousands of businesses close simply because they didn't prioritize marketing early enough. The problem is that many startup founders believe they cannot do any real marketing until they can afford it, and that's simply not true, because Marketing doesn't have to cost a dime! After 15 years handling growth for startups, Andrew Lee Miller, an accomplished, early-stage startup marketing expert, who's taken three young companies to multi-million dollar exits, found that there were tons of valuable growth strategies that could be implemented that don't cost anything. Bootstrapped Marketing, Growth Hacking, Organic Marketing and more, all refer to the lesser known ways of attaining scalable growth for your business without a large "war chest" for paid advertising, and Andrew has spent over a decade developing, testing, and proving out the best of the best strategies that actually work. The Startup Growth Book then is the culmination of Andrew's 15+ years of in-the-trenches startup growth experience and is the only business book out there that actually teaches entrepreneurs and marketers how to build sustainable, scalable growth, channel by channel, with zero advertising budget. Tried and tested by Andrew himself, this book directly draws from Andrew's experiences scaling over 100 startups in over a dozen nations and languages. This book is ideal for young marketers who want to learn cutting-edge tactics from a master, as well as new businesses that want to grow organically and prove traction without spending cash on Paid Advertising. For the first time ever, Andrew will show you how to scale organically using 10 different channels. Learn exactly how to launch and scale these channels without spending money: - Public Relations across all major media channels - Search Engine Optimization so people can discover you organically - Email Marketing to master the most effective means of marketing communication - Social Media Marketing and Influencer Marketing done right ... and more. After reading this book, you will be able to implement these lessons to drive growth in your business without needing to outsource to a Marketing agency, hire a marketing team, or even run any Facebook ads. Dozens of companies have already implemented Andrew's growth hacking tactics, and have scaled to millions of dollars in revenue.




Hacking Growth


Book Description

The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond. It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace’s sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn’t stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs. So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies’ extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and it’s practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers. Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers: attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more. An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.




Grow


Book Description

Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.




Let's Buy a Company


Book Description

The 1980s saw the beginning of the greatest merger boom in history. Year after year, the number of mergers and acquisitions climbed. Mergers between large companies make headlines, but companies of any size may find it beneficial to engage in mergers and acquisitions. Author H. Lee Rust explains the basics of acquisitions in clear, simple prose for companies that are too small to make the evening news. His book will be most useful to small- and medium-sized firms whose leaders lack experience in acquisitions. He provides sound, practical advice, easy-to-use checklists, and a CD-ROM workbook with spreadsheets, calculations, sample letters and more. If you manage a small company, getAbstract suggests reading this book before you get involved in your first acquisition.




The Living Company


Book Description

This book raises a fundamental question, What are companies & what are they for? Whereas the standard answer is that companies are organizations that carry out economic processes to produce goods or services, he argues that such narrow thinking leads to management practices & priorities that are detrimental to everyone--from shareholders to employees to stakeholders--often leading to the demise of firms. Today's scarce resource is knowledge, which is created by a company's human assets. As a result, management's top priority must be the optimization of human resources & its knowledge-creation ability to ensure the longevity of the firm. The author explores the theme of organizational learning & identifies four key elements to organizational survival & renewal: sensitivity to the environment (a company's ability to learn & adapt), cohesion & identity (a company's innate ability to create a community & a persona), tolerance (the ability to build constructive relationships with other entities), & conservative financing (the ability of a firm to govern its growth & evolution). Together, these four factors are essential to growth & viability. Winner, The Edwin G. Booz Prize for the Most Innovative, Insightful Management Book of 1997, The Financial Times/Booz-Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Awards. A Business Week Best Business Book of the Year. Named as one of the Best Business Books of the Year by the Financial Times. "With a light touch & an interesting variety of examples, de Geus employs biological metaphors in order to analyze corporate management [&] provides an interesting challenge to basic assumptions about the way companies work."--Business Week "The Living Company earns a spot as one of this year's best business books."--Quality Digest "This profound & uplifting book is for the leader in all of us."--Dr. James F. Moore, Author of The Death of Competition "In contrast to the common gaggle of management books, few of which can truthfully be called thought-provoking, The Living Company is one that deserves a read."--Training "Arie de Geus has written an excellent book that gives senior executives & board members provocative insights into success."--Directors & Boards "A seminal book that will initiate far-ranging discussions regarding the nature & purpose of the company."--National Productivity Review