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

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.