cover image Relentless Growth: How Silicon Valley Innovation Strategies Can Work in Your Business

Relentless Growth: How Silicon Valley Innovation Strategies Can Work in Your Business

Christopher Meyer. Free Press, $27.5 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-684-83446-7

In today's world of boundless international opportunity (Toys ""R"" Us is big in Japan, Citibank car loans are hot in India) and dire competition (Toyota is edging out Ford in the U.S.), American business must adopt the freer, more imaginative and resourceful style found among young growth companies in Silicon Valley. So advises consultant Meyer, founder of Strategic Alignment Group, in this treatise presented largely in the abstract. No nuts-and-bolts business handbook, this guide analyzes, compartmentalizes and constructs a designed approach to organizational management, cultural receptiveness to ideas, the use of selective ""teams"" for project development, an open social spirit among workers and so on. Planners and doers must fathom ""the assumptions beneath the selection"" of products and services to be developed, according to Meyer. At the same time, he observes, ""luck is a central element."" A focused look at a world where ""boundaries between products and services fade rapidly."" (Dec.)