Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 9 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning

How to Get More Out of What You Already Have

PROFITABLE GROWTH IS EVERYONE'S BUSINESS is based on living research. For the past twenty-five years I have, on a daily basis, been observing what is happening -- what is working and what isn't -- while it is actually happening in companies around the world.

My experiences with many of these companies have been long term -- a decade or more in many cases -- and the ideas I have developed for solving the growth dilemma are based on personally seeing what works in real time.

These are ideas tested across industries and that deliver results. My goal has always been to improve the practice of business by giving people tools they can put to use immediately, on Monday morning, if you will. These tools can seem like common sense, but all too often the biggest challenge in business is the translation of ideas into action. This is especially true when it comes to obtaining consistent revenue growth. The ultimate purpose of Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business is to provide the tools for people in every industry concerned about the prospect of generating sustained, internally generated top-line growth. Many people feel that their base business is being eroded by such factors as the lack of pricing power, excess capacity (too many suppliers chasing too few customers), and global competition. They are also seeing that cost-cutting and productivity improvements alone will not be enough to generate the kind of performance that will satisfy either shareholders, or, more important, the employees whose prospects depend on revenue growth generating future career opportunities. And, eventually, lack of growth makes a business uncompetitive in the eyes of customers, since without sustained revenue growth, the ability to innovate declines and a company goes into a death spiral.




Many people equate growth with -- in the language of baseball--"swinging for the fences," home runs that capture huge sales increases that will dramatically increase the size of their business. Growth is too often thought of only in big-dollar terms, breakthroughs such as the creation of a new business model, the development of a breakthrough product, the mega-merger, or a world-changing new technology. When it comes to growth, managers often think they have to "break the paradigm"; they say such things as, "If I can't get a double-digit gain by next year, it's not worth the effort." It's all or nothing. A single or double just doesn't seem good enough