Profitable Growth is Everyone's Business

10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning

By: Ram Charan

Narrated by: Harry Chase

Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

For many, growth is about "home runs": the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don't happen every day and frequently come in cycles.

Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena. A surer and more consistent path to profitable revenue growth is through "singles and doubles": small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business model.

Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone's business, not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company's call center to the CEO.

In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, profitable growth. For more than twenty-five years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.

©2004 Ram Charan (P)2004 Random House, Inc.

Educating Mysef

I stumbled onto Charan’s books about a year ago and can’t read them all fast enough or too many times.

Great for both thinkers and doers

This short listen is excellent for managers at all levels, from the C-suite to the front line.

Nothing groundbreaking

The ideas in this book were neither insightful nor original. I found myself drifting off as I listened to the generic advice. Although the real life examples that were given were interesting, they were not particularly helpful or relevant for the average business owner. I would recommmend this book primiarly to managers of large corporations.