Every Business Is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper Year After Year - Softcover

"There's no such thing as a mature business," only a growth business, write leading business consultants Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy. Every Business Is a Growth Business is a step-by-step manual for turning any company into an expanding company. The book is packed with real-world examples and key concepts for executives to get their businesses on an upward trajectory.

Charan and Tichy assert that growth requires sticking to two principles: "strategy from the outside in" and "changing the genetic code." The first means putting yourself in your customers' shoes and asking what are their needs and how are they changing. From this perspective, a company can redefine its market and come up with creative ways to expand demand. The second principle, changing the genetic code, means revamping the corporate culture so that a new mindset for growth can thrive. As anyone who has ever worked in a company knows, corporate culture is a hard thing to overhaul. The book gives concrete steps to make that happen; sometimes it requires whole new leadership.

Charan, who has been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and Northwestern University, and Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, speak from experience. They've advised companies such as Royal Dutch/Shell and Mercedes-Benz. One of their heroes is the late Roberto Goizueta of Coca-Cola. When Goizueta took over, the company was on cruise control. It dominated the U.S. soft- drink industry--a market that many experts believed was mature with nowhere to grow. Under conventional thinking, Coca-Cola was maxed out: it would do well just to defend each tenth of a percent of market share against archrival PepsiCo. But in the 1980s, Goizueta framed the question of market share in a different way. Goizueta got his top executives to see that globally, Coca-Cola accounted for less than 2 ounces of the 64 ounces of fluid that each of the world's 4.4 billion people drank on average every day. In one simple stroke, he redefined the market and opened vast new areas of opportunity for his company. Coca-Cola became an immensely successful growth company under his leadership. Similar stories about Compaq, Citibank, and other companies abound. Every Business Is a Growth Business is an inspiring and practical book for business leaders looking to grow their company. --Dan Ring

Praise for Every Business Is a Growth Business

"Charan and Tichy offer a compelling, no-nonsense approach to achieving top-line growth and bottom-line results. A must-read for leaders across all industries."
--Ray Lane, president and COO, Oracle Corporation

"Once again, we are afforded the opportunity to learn and grow from the incredible talents of Ram Charan and Noel Tichy. A practical and provocative book that challenges conventional thinking about growth. This is the new Breakfast of Champions for today's business leader."
--Robert E. Knowling, Jr., president and CEO, Covad Communications

"Charan and Tichy outline a way of opening up a business leader's thinking to see where new growth is to be found."
--Lester Thurow, MIT Sloan School of Management; author, The Future of Capitalism

"I have made Every Business Is a Growth Business required reading for my seventy most senior people. Ram Charan and Noel Tichy have created a framework for thinking that's realistic and practical, one that opens minds to new ways of growing a business. And reading about leaders whose stories they tell--it's like being in the same room with these people."
--Chad Holliday, president and CEO, DuPont

"For business today, it's the end of the world as we know it [and] Ram Charan and Noel Tichy incisively identify the key challenges we face. Further, they bring to life the cultural transformations necessary for companies to achieve sustainable, profitable growth--and perpetual success in any industry. Charan and Tichy are compelling voices."
--Peter A. Georgescu, chairman and CEO, Young & Rubicam

"A great blend of hard-nosed, straightforward advice mixed with a dash of theory and a tool kit for growth. Ram Charan and Noel Tichy make the impossible become possible with insights gleaned from many of the world's best business leaders."
--Steve Miller, Committee of Managing Directors, Shell International

"Engaging and disarmingly direct counsel on how winning leaders--at all levels, in every business--can push their organizations toward responsible growth, no matter how mature their markets or difficult their competition."

--Melvin R. Goodes, chairman and CEO, Warner-Lambert

"The global economy is to the modern corporation what the African savanna was to early man: an environment which requires the utmost in adaptive skills to survive and ultimately prosper. Ram Charan and Noel Tichy understand, as few others do, that growth is an absolute imperative in all companies and offer fresh insights into finding new avenues of growth."
--Bill Stavropoulos, president and CEO, Dow Chemical