Double-Digit Growth
How Great Companies Achieve It--No Matter What
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In their 1995 blockbuster The Discipline of Market Leaders, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema explained how great companies dominated their markets by offering superior value propositions. Now Treacy is back with an equally groundbreaking book—revealing how great companies master growth each year and how all businesses can identify and exploit opportunities for increased revenues, gross margins, and profits.
Treacy's main point is simple—it really is possible to grow your business by 10 percent or more, year after year, in good times and bad, without cheating. Great companies already know how to do it, and the rest of us can learn their strategies and do the same thing. Using case studies from industry leaders such as Dell Computer, Home Depot, and GE, he shows the five steps that are imperative to ensure growth:
• Keep the growth you have already earned
• Look for growth where it's likely to be found
• Take business from your competitors
Treacy believes that any business can grow at a consistent double-digit rate, and with Double-Digit Growth, managers and investors now have the tools to achieve that lofty goal and maintain corporate success.
On the web: http://www.michaeltreacy.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Growth, the lifeblood of industry, is the ability of a company to increase its revenues and profits by expanding its business--either by acquiring other companies, increasing its market share, or penetrating new or adjacent markets. While conventional business thinking has it that companies run through a lifecycle of rapid growth, maturity and decline, Treacy believes that double-digit growth is possible even for mature organizations. Take Harley-Davidson, which still exhibits double-digit growth after 100 years in the motorcycle business. However, many of Treacy's star companies (e.g. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Starbucks, Paychex) are still relatively young, while many of the firms he derides for sluggish growth (AT&T, Proctor & Gamble, Revlon) are longstanding firms in mature industries. Treacy's"5 Disciplines" for growth--retain your customer base, gain market share, exploit your market position, penetrate adjacent markets, invest in new lines of business--are too simplistic to be of much practical use. What's valuable in this book are the narratives that describe how some companies have imaginatively achieved significant growth. For example, Treacy relates how Sony beat out Microsoft, Sega, and Nintendo for domination of the once-flat video game market by teaming up with video game developers, driving down the price of consoles, excelling at distribution, and convincing an untapped adult market that video games were not just for kids. Likewise, General Electric controls"customer churn" by creating"sticky" relationships with clients that make it hard for them to defect from GE. Treacy argues convincingly that there are opportunities for creative growth in even the most moribund industries, given the right combination of imagination, expertise and market discipline. Such advice should be helpful to might just be the shot in the arm corporate America needs.
