RGM

Even in the best of times, most companies struggle to gain traction in their growth initiatives. Today the world is full of uncertainties. Many companies have become risk-averse. Others must dig their way out of a downturn. Growth is even more elusive than before — yet more necessary than ever.

How can you achieve truly dynamic growth, without risking an expensive gamble? By adopting a practical, organic "discovery driven" approach to innovation.

In Discovery-Driven Growth, authors and longtime consultants Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan show how you can plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence. You’ll learn how to reframe your strategic opportunities, test each project assumption against a series of specific checkpoints, and act on evidence and learning. You'll control your costs more effectively, minimize surprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects before it's too late. Quite simply, McGrath and MacMillan provide the road-tested plans that you need — regardless of industry or location — to ensure maximum success with your new initiatives.

There's no way around it. Companies must grow to survive. But the dismal failure rate of most growth strategies speaks volumes about how poorly understood — and therefore grossly mismanaged—this vital business process really is.

In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan outline a systematic, field-tested method for identifying specific types of growth opportunities, choosing the best option for a company's competitive situation, and executing that strategy in a way that achieves spectacular growth. Best of all, the authors show that these opportunities can easily be found within a firm's existing customer base, offerings, internal processes and competitive arena.

McGrath and MacMillan argue that the key to exploiting these opportunities lies in strategic moves they call "MarketBusters": approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry and upend conventional competition. Based on an intensive three-year research program, MarketBusters reveals forty marketbusting moves used by firms to successfully transform their market spaces. The book maps these moves to five strategic lenses through which companies can analyze their current business, and includes targeted "prospecting questions" and corresponding tools to guide executives as they mine areas for growth opportunities.

The authors also describe a simple analytical tool to assist executives in ensuring they have prepared their organizations to successfully execute the chosen strategy. Vivid company examples from industries as diverse as manufacturing, software, retail, and pharmaceuticals illustrate each move in practice, and cautionary tales reveal common pitfalls that could cause well-intentioned strategies to backfire.

Filled with tools, checklists, and techniques proven to work in even the most unforgiving competitive environments, MarketBusters is the indispensable field guide to realizing sustained, profitable growth.

Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete.

Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.