From the Back Cover
Accelerate your company's growth in a disciplined fashion. This book provides leaders of large and small companies a proven comprehensive framework to think systematically about growth options and to yield practical strategies that produce faster growth.
Drawing insights from case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies, strategy teacher and venture capitalist Peter Cohan models his systematic approach to brainstorming, evaluating, and implementing growth strategies across five dimensions: Customers, Geography, Products, Capabilities, Culture. He examines each of these five growth dimensions in turn, selecting and organizing his cases to compare the growth strategies deployed successfully and unsuccessfully by large and small companies along the given dimension. In each of his five dimensional chapters, the author derives from his case analyses the key principles and processes for creating and achieving faster growth.
Professor Cohan draws on a network of hundreds of founders, CEOs, and investors developed through his decades of consulting, authorship of 11 books, and over five years as a Forbes columnist. He shows through many compelling stories how leaders craft effective growth strategies.
Business leaders will learn the following lessons from this book:
- Achieving rapid but sustainable growth is a business leader's most important responsibility - and leaders must approach this challenge with a mixture of vision, intellectual humility, and a willingness to experiment and learn from failure.
- The growth challenges facing companies that are currently growing quickly differ from the ones that stagnating or shrinking companies must overcome.
- Companies can achieve growth along one or more of the dimensions simultaneously - and they often expand geographically to customers in the same segments.
- Useful insights can emerge from comparing case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies pursuing similar growth strategies.
- Companies should select a growth strategy based on three factors: the attractiveness of the growth opportunity, the company's capabilities to provide superior value to customers in the selected market, and the expected return on investment in the growth vector.
- Companies should select a growth strategy that best fits their capabilities and culture and they must enhance both to adapt to new growth opportunities.
Peter Cohan is Lecturer of Strategy at Babson College. He teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to undergraduate and MBA students at Babson College. He is the founding principal of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He has completed over 150 growth strategy consulting projects for global technology companies and invested in seven startups - three of which were sold for over $2 billion. Peter has written 11 books and writes columns on entrepreneurship for Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur. Prior to starting his firm, he worked as a case team leader for Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter's consulting firm and taught at MIT, Stanford, and the University of Hong Kong. Peter earned an MBA from Wharton, did graduate work in computer science at MIT, and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Swarthmore College.
