By Michael Treacy

Chapter 1: Why Is It So Hard to Grow?

• Which has grown faster since 1997: Intel or inflation? If you picked Intel, you lose.
• After spending $100 billion on acquisitions over five years, AT&T's CEO Michael Armstrong achieved (a) higher revenues, (b) no gain, or (c) lower revenues. Incredibly, the answer is (c).
• In 1997, Procter & Gamble's CEO vowed to double its business in seven years. If it continues to grow at the pace that it has actually set since then, how many more years will it take to reach its goal: two, twelve, or twenty-five? Answer: yes, twenty-five years. P&G is a little behind schedule because it's only managed to grow an average of 2.4 percent annually since 1997.
• What does Revlon blame its growth woes on: a weak economy, political uncertainties, or competition? Answer: all three. Management apparently believes that mascara sales are very sensitive to political uncertainties.
• In 2000, Gateway Computer declared in its annual report that pursuing growth would be "kind of silly" that year. Could Gateway do anything sillier? Yes. The company skipped growth in 2001 and 2002 as well, so its revenues shrank for all three years.
• When Chris Galvin became Motorola's chief executive in 1997, the company earned more than $1 billion a year. By how much have the corporation's profits since exceeded Galvin's compensation? Answer: by zero. While Galvin took home $45 million, Motorola reported a cumulative loss. Worse, Galvin messed up revenues as well.
• IBM's much-touted CEO, Lou Gerstner, grew the company's business-service revenues at double-digit rates. True or false? False. Big Blue's service revenues actually rose a mere 5 percent in 2001, Gerstner's last year at the helm, and only 3 percent the year before (so much for the myth that IBM owns the service business). During Gerstner's entire ten-year reign, in fact, mighty IBM's overall growth averaged 2.9 percent a year, barely enough to stay ahead of inflation.
• Is Caterpillar now the world's number-two or number-three maker of farm equipment? Trick question. In 2001, the big Cat sold its agricultural division for a loss, after getting plowed under by John Deere. It's now limping along with 2 percent annual revenue growth, flat gross profits, and declining earnings.
• "We're convinced, in fact, that the greatest challenge ahead may be simply keeping up with the demand." Which eminent CEO spoke those brave words eighteen months before his company's revenues plummeted by $6 billion? None other than Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems.

I could go on and on. In fact, I could rip down the entire list of Fortune 500 companies, or the Fortune Global 500 for that matter, and redline case after case of supposedly healthy businesses in a comatose state of feeble growth, no growth, or actual shrinkage. And don't blame it all on today's floundering economy. Throughout the heady nineties, these major companies hardly grew at all. While others boomed, they straggled along in slow motion, sometimes not going bust thanks only to creative accounting.

What's going on? The truth is that big chunks of Corporate America, along with their counterparts in Asia and Europe, have fallen victim to no-growth paralysis--a broad, profound, systemic illness worsened by constant denial. It represents a serious threat to the health of the business community here and around the world.

Growth is the oxygen of business, the key to business life or death. Growing enterprises thrive; shrinking companies vanish. Why, then, is a lack of growth the dirty little secret of today's corporations? Why are so many companies, in fact, blocked, stalled, or stunted? Why do so many managers preside over no-growth organizations without confronting the reality that accepting the status quo is the business equivalent of committing suicide?

This book offers my answer. It argues that the way we think about and pursue business growth is fundamentally flawed and overdue for a dramatically new approach. To that end, I have identified a portfolio of five growth disciplines that, followed with care and dedication, can aid any enterprise--yours included--in achieving steady, double-digit growth year after year. In the chapters to come, I describe and analyze each of these disciplines along with specific insights and strategies to help in their application. Throughout, I show how companies of every size and variety have learned to mix and match the disciplines in the portfolio to fit their individual needs. The goal: to provide a simple, practical guide to point your company toward substantial, sustainable growth.

My work as a consultant over the past eight years has focused exclusively on the challenge of growth. It has taken me to corporations large and small, some growing spectacularly, others in decline. In most cases, I found that senior management was poorly equipped to meet the challenges of growth.

But I also found organizations that achieved double-digit growth year after year. Such value-multipliers included well-known stars--among them Wal-Mart, Harley Davidson, Starbucks, and Dell. These major winners shared an intense focus on customer value that I described in my book, The Discipline of Market Leaders. But as I continued to follow their success over the years, I realized that their dramatic growth derived from something beyond their customer focus, crucial as that was. The secret was not a single magic bullet; it was their ability to combine many skills and strengths in a sustained, relentless way that made each company a powerhouse, virtually unbeatable in its field.

I soon observed that other companies--including H&R Block, Lowe's, Johnson Controls, and Medtronic--were achieving double-digit growth with less publicity but equally impressive results that could not be attributed to any single cause, such as brilliant positioning, a powerhouse product, or sheer luck. It became increasingly clear that winners prevailed not because they grew in sudden spurts but rather because they grew in steady strides. These companies managed growth in effective ways that delivered sustainable, predictable results.

Even more intriguing was my discovery that a large number of virtually anonymous organizations--such as Mohawk Industries, Paychex, Oshkosh Truck, Manitowoc, and Biomet--have also been achieving double-digit gains in revenue, gross profits, and net income over many years. If they can do it, I began to ask myself, why can't Intel, AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Revlon, Motorola, IBM, Caterpillar, and Sun?

The amazing disparity between so many stalled companies with famous logos and so many relatively obscure steady-growers was a phenomenon I had to investigate further. It led me to formally study the growth habits of some 130 businesses of all kinds and sizes. The insights gained from this research comprise the heart of my argument for a drastic improvement in the management systems, tools, and techniques by which corporations achieve growth.

Right now, growth management in many organizations is almost laughable. Ask nearly any management team to meet a cost budget, cut 10 percent from its expenses, or implement a new process improvement, and it is generally up to the task. That's because the techniques for achieving these results are well understood. But ask the same managers to grow at double-digit rates, and they typically look blank. They clearly lack the tools--the disciplines--to tackle growth in a structured, systematic way.

Here's a simple test of whether your management team is equipped to handle growth. It measures whether it has the baseline information needed to make sense out of your company's past growth. Can your team answer these questions?

• How much growth did customer churn cost your business last year? If your company had retained its customer base as successfully as the best competitor in your industry, how much faster would your business have grown?
• How much of your company's gain in market share was achieved by selling more to its current customers, as opposed to attracting new customers from competitors?
• Has it been cheaper in your industry to grow market share organically or to acquire competitors?
• If your organization had been positioned only in the fastest-growing segments of your market, how much faster would it have grown?
• What have been the three fastest-growing markets adjacent to your market, where the company's key capabilities could have been leveraged for advantage? How much growth did your enterprise achieve in each of them?
• How much of your corporation's growth is attributable to new markets that it entered in the past five years?
• If you can answer these questions, your company probably has a disciplined approach to managing growth. If you can't, you don't.

Too many management teams view double-digit growth as something beyond their control--a sudden change in customer taste, say, or an unexpected breakthrough in the research labs. They assume it's all in the lap of the gods, like winning the lottery. They have no idea that it is the result of disciplined management practices.

The growth stagnation this book diagnoses and treats is hardly confined to marginal organizations. For many businesses, single-digit growth has become the norm. Why do so many managers accept low growth? Is it because they secretly love the status quo and are afraid of change? Growth, after all, rivals profit as the most sacred word in the business canon.

No, this contagion of dither and drift--of sheer standing still--is more likely caused by ignorance than by fear. Growth ignorance has seemingly numbed good business minds and dumbed down managerial response.The result is startling: from 1997 to 2002, the thirty corporations that make up the prestigious Dow Jones Average grew at a collective annual rate of only 4.9 percent in revenues, 4 percent in gross profits, and 0.5 percent in after-tax profits. And those numbers, bad as they are, are tilted by such strong performers as Home Depot, Merck, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and CitiGroup.

Exclude them, and you see that after-tax profits of the remaining twenty-five companies have actually shrunk since 1997, while revenues and gross profits have grown at 2.3 percent and 1.6 percent a year, respectively, about the rate of inflation. The conclusion is inescapable: a growth disease is debilitating scores of corporations, sapping their vigor and vision, to say nothing of their life expectancy. To better understand the disease, let's examine its pernicious effect on just one organization, Corning, once a healthy giant of the fiber-optics industry, now an invalid with a tenuous chance of recovery.

Virtuous Cycles Become Vicious Cycles

In 2000, Corning's annual report brimmed with good cheer: "Looking forward to 2001, Corning will continue to invest in new-product development, capacity expansion, and external growth. Corning expects its sales will grow by 20 percent to 25 percent and that each segment's net income will show double-digit growth."

Corning managers had some reason to be optimistic. After all, they had just closed the books on their second year of double-digit growth. After bouncing around between $3 billion and $4 billion of revenues since 1990, Corning had really taken off in 1999, booking a 24 percent increase in sales. The following year was even better. Revenues reached $7.1 billion, a 50 percent increase in a single year. It was only natural for Corning's management to focus on those two years, when the telecommunications bubble greatly expanded demand for fiber cable, rather than on the previous nine years, when the same management team had failed to achieve consistent growth.

Corning's predictions about growth turned out to be double delusions. The spring of 2001, just when the 2000 annual report was issued, was Corning's last heyday. In the afterglow of its 2000 performance, the company launched a celebration called "150 Years of Innovation" and happily found itself on now-defunct Red Herring's list of the one hundred most innovative businesses. Unhappily, the heyday soured fast. Corning shares plunged tenfold from the fall of 2000 to that spring of 2001. Unlike thousands of small investors, Wall Street professionals quickly discounted Corning's golden immediate past. They perceived a leaden future--the steady collapse of top Corning customers in telecommunications and electronics, a debacle that astute investors surmised would inevitably ravage Corning itself. They dumped the company's shares by the millions, driving its market value through the floor.

When the books closed on the year 2001, Wall Street's evaluation was proven accurate. Corning reported a decline in revenues of 12 percent, spread across every division, and a huge operating loss of $5.5 billion. Wall Street buzzed with rumors about an impending bankruptcy. The following year proved to be even worse. Revenues declined a further 50 percent to $3.2 billion, and the company reported additional losses of $1.4 billion. In a mere two years, the corporation wiped out two decades of earnings; revenues returned to their 1990 level.

What happened to Corning? Simple: its managers' growth strategy failed completely. Instead of double-digit sales growth, it produced double-digit declines. Lifted to historic highs by a tidal wave of demand, the stock plummeted when the demand suddenly receded, leaving the company as helpless as a beached whale. Quite simply, Corning managers were seduced by a demand bubble they thought would never end. They were unable to use their good fortunes to build an effective approach to growth, which had been so glaringly absent before the bubble. They failed to see that growth endures not because of fortuitous demand, a hot product, or any single tactic.

Growth endures when management follows a portfolio of disciplines to ensure that a broad set of growth opportunities are identified and captured as routinely as costs are controlled and processes improved. The Corning mess is a cautionary tale for all businesses, especially those given to taking growth for granted.

Companies decay when they stop growing. That's because growth is a self-reinforcing process that builds on past performance. It is driven by three virtuous cycles that act as catalysts, ensuring that the more you grow, the easier it is to grow even more. Conversely, the less you grow, the harder it is to grow at all--the vicious cycle.

During Corning's two heady growth years, its managers benefited from these virtuous cycles. Little did they anticipate the destructive force unleashed when virtuous cycles reverse direction and become destructive.

The first virtuous cycle is economic. Faster growth leads to higher price/earnings (P/E) multiples, which, in turn, lead to a higher share price, since shareholders can anticipate higher future earnings. Higher share prices enable a company to raise capital more cheaply, whether it borrows money or issues new shares. More capital makes possible more investment, which, in turn, drives higher growth.

When growth slowed at Corning, its P/E multiple and share price dropped precipitously. Capital became more expensive and more difficult to raise. Result: having recently spent more than $10 billion on growth-oriented acquisitions, Corning was forced to raise cash by selling a valued division to 3M for a relatively cheap $840 million. The corporation next slashed capital spending and severely cut research and development. Having sacrificed long-term investment for short-term survival, Corning has made it difficult to reignite growth in the future.

The second virtuous cycle of growth is about momentum. Fast growth gets the attention of customers, both current and potential; it also boosts customer confidence and enhances a company's reputation for excellence. Customer confidence drives higher growth rates. It's that simple: customers want to do business with winners.

Corning's troubles had the opposite effect. With each announcement graver than the last, Corning's best customers were forced to insulate themselves from these problems. How? They sought out additional sources of supply, reducing their dependence on Corning, and demanded that Corning give them better contractual terms--moves that inevitably impeded Corning's efforts to restart growth.

The third virtuous growth cycle is about opportunity. Growth leads to new job opportunities within the organization, which, in turn, lead to higher morale. High morale makes it easier to achieve innovations and improve productivity, the fuel of better customer value. A better value proposition drives faster growth.

Faced with falling revenues, Corning managers knew they had to reduce costs. Choosing a necessary but destructive option, they froze salaries, eliminated twelve thousand jobs, and permanently shuttered half a dozen plants in 2001. Morale was shattered, thus launching another vicious cycle. Innovation and productivity suffered, depressing the value proposition. Shattered dreams were heaped on dead ambitions. Morale and opportunity hit bottom.

Much to their dismay, Corning managers discovered early in 2002 that they had not done enough. It was like trying to sell a house in a falling market, regularly cutting prices, always a step behind the decline, chasing demand to the very bottom.

Revenues kept sliding as the virtuous cycles turned vicious and secondary effects multiplied. The drop in future investments, in customer confidence, and in company morale combined to drive huge declines in revenues in 2002. More write-offs were taken, more losses declared. More plants were closed and another 6,800 people were let go, including the chief executive, John Loose, and the leader of the company's largest division. Corning stock ended the year trading at less than 1 percent of its historic high.

With a last-minute influx of expensive new capital, Corning staved off concerns about bankruptcy and staggered into 2003. Management now maintains that it may be two or three more years before Corning can reignite growth. Good luck. Fortunately, few businesses face the extreme challenges of Corning, but every low-growth organization must endure the debilitating effects of virtuous growth cycles running in reverse. Low growth leads to less reinvestment, lower customer confidence, and faltering employee morale. It is an aggressive disease.

Five Paths to Perdition

If high growth is the sine qua non of business success, as it surely is, then its elusiveness should come as no surprise. Whatever makes winners in a world of losers is bound to be hard to achieve. In fact, high growth is so slippery that its absence is not only epidemic among average businesses but also a constant threat to the most established corporations in the land. Let's sample the incidence of no-growth disease in the supposedly healthy universe of blue-chip enterprises.

Why are so many seemingly strong enterprises spiraling downward? Are they being replaced by "transformational companies," as some would have us believe? Do they represent aging business models doomed to be overtaken by a new generation of high-energy startups?

Actually, the degeneration of a major company is more often a case of self-destruction than of being lapped by a newer business model. Most decaying enterprises are brought down by their own managers, yoked to wishful thinking and dumb tactics that fail to deliver growth.

At Motorola, for example, three generations of Galvins have run the company for most of its seventy-five-year history, raising it from a tiny electric-transformer company to a multibillion-dollar enterprise. But since Chris Galvin, the grandson of the founder, assumed the helm at the beginning of 1997, the corporation's stock price has dropped by 85 percent. With sales shrinking an average of 2.5 percent a year, big losses have ensued. How could a leader of the wireless revolution get so bogged down?

Revlon is an even grimmer case. During one three-year stretch of billionaire Ron Perelman's ownership, Revlon's revenues dropped in every single quarter--twelve straight declines. Its stock recently traded for about 3 percent of its peak value in 2000--and its debt has been dropped to junk status. An enterprise that had dominated cosmetics counters for half a century is now fighting for relevance.

AT&T's Mike Armstrong, as I noted earlier, spent more than a fortune acquiring cable television, Internet access, and local-telephone businesses. What does he have to show for the money? Revenues and gross profits are lower than they were five years ago. Now, Armstrong is breaking up AT&T into its component parts, selling them one by one, and the only surviving fragment is providing long-distance phone service.

How does such appalling disintegration get started? How do organizations stop growing? There are five paths to perdition.

1. The company may have overexploited its franchise by neglecting customer value for years. If customers can't move to another supplier quickly, they will endure inferior value but only until they find a better option.
2. The company may have placed a bad bet on a market in which growth came to a screeching halt. Overinvested and overextended, the organization becomes vulnerable to competitors with greater financial resources and flexibility.
3. The company may have lost a proprietary advantage. Examples include the expiration of a patent, a compromise in a special distribution relationship, or the removal of regulatory protection.
4. The company may have missed a significant value shift in a marketplace. Customers whose buying had been based on product features are now focusing on price, or customers who had gone with low-price suppliers are now shifting to total-solution suppliers.
5. The company may have been caught napping by a new competitor with next-generation value. This is the rarest of the paths.

Which of these five problem areas afflicted Motorola, Revlon, and AT&T?

Don't blame Motorola's woes on the high-tech downturn. While Motorola was turning in a cumulative loss from 1997 to 2002, its closest competitor, Nokia, racked up profits of $14 billion and grew them during that period at an average annual compound rate of 17 percent. During that same period, as Motorola's revenues were declining, Nokia increased sales at an annual compound rate of 27 percent. Wireless communications has been a very good market to be in.

Clearly, Nokia caught Motorola's managers napping. Motorola thought its leading-edge technology could support sky-high prices for cell phones, but Nokia had another idea. Motorola also missed a significant market shift, as cell phones became fashion accessories with shortened life cycles and mass distribution requirements.

Most surprising, Motorola made an almost fatal misjudgment in technology. When cell phones shifted from analog to digital technology, Motorola was late to the party, surrendering sales momentum to Nokia and Ericsson. By 1998, digital phones were outselling analog devices, and Motorola's share of them was only 11.5 percent. Meanwhile, Nokia had scooped up 40 percent of the market and Ericsson had another 20 percent. Motorola still hasn't recovered.

Revlon was simply clueless in the face of competitors such as Estée Lauder, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson's Neutrogena division. Perelman, who gained control of Revlon in a hostile takeover in 1985, gave the company a boost by hiring supermodel Cindy Crawford to be its spokeswoman and represent its image. But her heavy makeup went out of style, replaced by a more natural look that apparently escaped Revlon's notice.

Adding to Revlon's woes was the attrition of neighborhood drugstores, once the key to its cosmetic marketing. The cruelest cut of all came from younger customers such as twenty-five-year-old Zsuzsanna Vig, who declared in a New York Times article that Revlon's lipstick "smells like an old woman."

In 1999, Perelman brought in a new chief executive, Jeffrey Nugent from Neutrogena, to turn the corporation around. Nugent fired Crawford, but a new line of products did only moderately well; the Revlon image remained hopelessly dowdy. Another new CEO, Jack L. Stahl, arrived in 2002. Stahl, who came from outside the cosmetics business, was hired away from Coca-Cola on Perelman's hunch that a fresh outside eye might be clearer. Stahl said he is looking forward to "learning the dynamics of the industry."

AT&T had possibly the worst case of the no-growth disease: it made bad bets on new markets, lagged on customer value, milked the market until it dried up, and was caught napping by new competitors. Finally, it lost a proprietary advantage when new regulations allowed local phone companies to enter its long-distance market before AT&T had established itself as a primary provider of local service.

Armstrong admitted that his acquisition strategy and timing were badly off-target. In his words, he "didn't foresee the dot-com implosion, didn't foresee the telecom implosion or the economic recession." It may be unfair to blame him entirely for AT&T's loss to its new rivals. After all, charlatans at Qwest, Global Crossing, and other corporations were offering outstanding value to customers while paying little attention to the fact that they weren't turning profits.

Any company can temporarily lose its way and wander down one or another of the paths to perdition. It happens to the best of organizations from time to time, but the multitude of missteps at Motorola, Revlon, AT&T, and other such growth failures is indicative of haphazard and undisciplined growth management.

The Road to Double-Digit Growth

In my studies, the businesses that steadily delivered double-digit growth had guiding principles and management disciplines that stood in stark contrast to those at Motorola, Revlon, AT&T, and other no-growth and low-growth businesses.

The fundamental advantage of steadily growing companies is that they hedge their bets against the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world; they minimize risk by never putting all their eggs in one basket. For example, they don't allow the business to become dependent on one breakthrough, recognizing that it may have a short half-life, a brilliant patent, for example, whose lifetime is limited, or a dominant technology that may be outflanked, or a temporary monopoly susceptible to new regulations, or a price spike for an indispensable commodity that enrages customers and inevitably invites low-price competition. All such one-shot advantages create growth, yes, but mainly short-term growth spurts on narrow fronts that lull managers into a comatose state where they can be more easily blindsided or sandbagged by competitors.

By contrast, the steady-growth companies I studied were clearly protected by multifront strategies that kept them moving forward as a whole even when some fronts collapsed. Six key principles defined their approach to growth, enabling them to seize opportunities while minimizing risk. The six key principles are:

• Spread the risk. Every growth initiative has two potential sides, up and down, neither wholly predictable. If you depend on just one initiative, you have a high chance of failure. Accordingly, you need to hedge your bets by creating a portfolio of many initiatives that complement each other. In short, and as noted just above, diversify, diversify, diversify.
• Take small bites. Don't let double-digit growth become a challenge so huge that it seems unmanageable. Make it easy on yourself: decompose the problem. Set up smaller growth objectives in several complementary areas, and then exceed them. Don't choke on the double-digit challenge. Split it into small bites you can easily chew and swallow.
• Balance your strategies. You limit your potential if you grow your business mainly by organic expansion or by acquisitions. You progress faster when you recognize the complementary nature of these approaches and strive for a balance between the two. Organic and acquired growth have different strengths, and there is a time and a place for each.
• Commit to superior value. Nothing stops growth faster than an inferior value proposition; nothing spurs growth faster than a superior one. To foil competitors on every front, make sure you offer top value in all aspects of your business. Superior value makes everything easier. It's the key to retaining more customers, gaining greater market share, and penetrating more new markets.
• Expand growth capabilities. Management capacity, not market demand, is usually the binding constraint on growth. To loosen that bind, and grow at faster rates, focus first on your growth capabilities in deciding whether, where, and how to expand the enterprise. Your business won't grow if it lacks the operating capacity to grow.
• Manage for growth. Establish a distinct system for managing a growth portfolio through varied market conditions. The system should coordinate and focus all growth aspects, including attitudes, behavior, information, review processes, roles, and responsibilities. The purpose, needless to say, is to maximize growth as the common cause of every person and every unit of your organization.

These six growth principles underpin my portfolio approach to double-digit growth. To a degree, as we'll see in Chapter 9, the growth portfolio is similar to a diversified investment portfolio designed to risk capital in ways that can both increase and preserve it. Similarly, growth portfolios can be managed to improve the predictability of growth even though the underlying initiatives are inherently risky and unpredictable. The growth portfolio is based upon five growth disciplines.

1. The first discipline focuses on improving the company's customer-base retention. One of the easiest ways to improve growth is to slow the rate at which you lose your existing customers. As we'll see in Chapter 4, retaining customers requires much more than the simple loyalty programs employed by many organizations today.
2. The second growth discipline focuses on market share gain. This is usually the toughest, nastiest way to growth, because it requires tearing customers away from a competitor. No company gives up market share without a struggle. In Chapter 5, we'll explore both organic and acquired market share growth initiatives.
3. The third discipline focuses on making sure you show up where growth is going to happen. Market positioning, when done right, is perhaps the easiest way to grow, because it requires little more than establishing a presence in the fastest-growing segments of a market and getting a decent piece of the action. As we'll see in Chapter 6, spotting those growth opportunities early and getting established with sufficient market share is a major challenge.
4. The fourth discipline focuses on penetrating adjacent markets. It requires a steely appraisal of whether your core operating capabilities can truly give you an advantage in an ancillary market, and whether your organization can build or acquire the additional capabilities needed to meet competitive standards in that market. In Chapter 7, we'll examine companies that have mastered those skills.
5. The fifth discipline focuses on achieving growth by invading new lines of business, where your core operating capabilities are of little advantage. As we'll see in Chapter 8, this discipline is built on smart investing rather than management skills. It's a growth discipline that few management teams are likely to master without further training and experience.

Double-Digit Growth Is a Choice

Hearing corporate managers explain away their growth problems is a little like listening to an addict in denial. Don't they understand that growth is a choice--a choice that lies entirely within their power and no one else's? Don't they realize that growing is a choice to succeed and not growing is a choice to fail?

Double-digit growth doesn't come free. A business doesn't grow because the economy permits it, the government subsidizes it, customers clamor for it, or a higher power shines its light upon it. In fact, hardly any of the forces you contend with really want you to grow, since your gain portends their loss.

Yet, double-digit growth is not a dream but a plausible scenario. The economy, though important, is but a small factor in the growth potential of any one company. Competition, though fierce, can be outfought and outflanked. Customers, though demanding, want to grow with value-creating suppliers.

If the challenge of double-digit growth appears a bit daunting, as it may to some readers, undaunt yourself and take heart. The beauty of the five growth disciplines is that any company is capable of carrying them out, consistent with its own particular ambitions and circumstances.

If that sounds like a promise--my value proposition for this book--you've heard right. In the next chapter, I offer a growth-discipline analysis of six corporations: Johnson Controls, Mohawk Industries, Paychex, Biomet, Oshkosh Truck, and Dell Computer. My hope is that their success will foreshadow your own organization's takeoff.