Double-Digit Growth : How Great Companies Achieve It--No Matter What

The world-renowned consultant and bestselling author of "The Discipline of Market Leaders" answers every company's most compelling need.

From Amazon.com

After Michael Treacy finished writing his bestseller, The Discipline of Market Leaders, he continued to track the companies profiled to answer one major question: how do market-leading companies foster growth? In Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It—No Matter What the MIT Management Professor addresses this problem with a five-part portfolio of management disciplines. He offers case studies of well-known and little-known companies that have achieved growth year after year based on this diversified approach.

His first three disciplines--"keep the growth you have already earned," "take business from your competitors," and "show up where the growth is going to happen"--may seem obvious, and even beyond the control of the average executive. But Treacy provides frameworks for applying each as business practice, not just wishful thinking. His fourth and fifth disciplines, "invade adjacent markets" and "invest in new lines of business," are perhaps the most controversial. Here, though, he is not advising rampant conglomeration. Rather, he stresses the need for acquisitions and expansions made based on reliable data predicting long-term growth with risk spread over diversified investments.

Treacy is not presenting a step-by-step formula for success. Through his quick, readable prose he offers instead a course in mental re-training for executives. A management team must construct tools for tracking and measuring its success against each of the five growth disciplines, and it must build a corporate culture that instills growth as a core goal. While he offers no guarantees, his arguments are compelling, and the nuanced management strategies he suggests seem a plausible base for attaining predictable growth.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 --Patrick O’Kelley

From 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.

Book Dimension
Height (mm) 214 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Width (mm) 148