The Granularity of Growth: How to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance [Hardcover]

Patrick Viguerie (Author), Sven Smit (Author), Mehrdad Baghai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2008

While growth is a top priority for companies of all sizes, it can be extremely difficult to create and maintain—especially in today’s competitive business environment. The Granularity of Growth will put you in a better position to succeed as it reveals why growth is so important, what enables certain companies to grow so spectacularly, and how to ensure that growth comes from multiple sources as you take both a broad and a granular view of your markets.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

While growth is a top priority for companies of all sizes, it can be extremely difficult to create and maintain—especially in today's competitive business environment. In order to achieve this goal, you need to think through the growth challenges your organization faces and follow a detailed approach that will allow you to uncover, understand, and capture potential growth opportunities.

In The Granularity of Growth, Patrick Viguerie and Sven Smit—partners in McKinsey&Company's strategy practice—along with Mehrdad Baghai, coauthor of the bestselling The Alchemy of Growth, will show you how to do this and much more.

Based on an extensive quantitative study of corporate growth, this reliable resource offers powerful new insights on how companies can excel in this essential endeavor. It skillfully demonstrates the problem with the broad-brush way that many modern companies describe their business opportunities—"China is where the action is" or "Aging will generate increased demand for healthcare"—and discusses how real growth can be found at a much more granular level, in "pockets of opportunity" within all industries.

Divided into three comprehensive parts, each section of this book is devoted to one of the key decisions you'll need to make in order to drive and sustain granular growth at scale.

• I) Your growth ambition: Sustaining superior value creation in the long run requires companies to choose either to grow or to go. If you choose to grow, here's where you'll learn how granularity allows you to gain real insight into the sources of growth and enables robust growth benchmarking relative to one's peers.

• II) Your growth direction: Moving your portfolio in pursuit of growth is more common and less risky than you think and is where real value is derived. Here, you'll become familiar with a new framework that provides a rigorous basis for setting your growth strategy and deciding on growth initiatives over multiple horizons.

• III) Your growth architecture: To wire your organization for growth, you must enable it to make more granular growth choices while maintaining the benefits of scale. Here you'll discover an approach for ensuring your organizational model is consistent with your granular growth strategy.

Written in an engaging and informative style, The Granularity of Growth will put you in a better position to succeed as it reveals why growth is so important, what enables certain companies to grow sospectacularly, and how to ensure that growth comes from multiple sources as you take both a broad and a granular view of your markets.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Granularity of Growth

"Every manager should read this book now. I've benefited from its insights already and wish I'd known them earlier."
—Jorma Ollila, Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell and Nokia Oy

"In today's global economy, a company must either exhibit growth or financially engineer a powerful value proposition; otherwise, you go backwards. This is a must-read for aspiring as well as incumbent CEOs."
—F. Duane Ackerman, Chairman Emeritus, BellSouth

"For established companies in mature markets who are looking to outperform competing sources of capital, The Granularity of Growth is a life-saver. What Viguerie, Smit, and Baghai make clear is that growth is omnipresent in every market, typically in pockets of $50 million to $200 million, all crying out for attention. There are literally millions of these pockets, and the job of managers everywhere is to get their resources extracted from the low-return pursuit of seeking market share across a flat and level plain and allocated, instead, to these rich granular opportunities."
—Geoffrey Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and Dealing with Darwin

"Just simply running faster on the market share treadmill will not secure the future of your company. The Granularity of Growth shows, with typical McKinsey rigor, that where you compete is even more important than how. A great corporate strategy book with very practical applications."
—Dick Anderson, former vice chairman, BellSouth

"Very insightful and highly valuable. Viguerie, Smit, and Baghai go to more detailed lengths of analysis and offer extremely useful guidance for business strategists."
—Phil Rosenzweig, Professor of Strategy, IMD and author, The Halo Effect

"This book will change forever the way we look at growth. Contrary to popular belief, it demonstrates that good execution and market share are not the key determinants of fast growth. By emphasizing the need to dig down below the industry level to identify growth opportunities, the book is destined to become the standard reference work on growth. It deserves to be part of every thinking manager's business library."
—Costas Markides, Robert P. Bauman Professor of Strategic Leadership, London Business School

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470270209
• ISBN-13: 978-0470270202
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grow or Die....Finally some real insight on how to stay alive, September 18, 2008

By 

Jane F. Alexander "Partner, Mercer Consulting" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Granularity of Growth: How to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance (Hardcover)

In a business environment where meteoric falls are outpacing meteoric rises, the business community has been waiting for this important book on creating sustainable growth. This book will challenge executives to look at their growth strategies differently than they have in the past. Chasing market share by selling more or acquiring competitors might lengthen a Company's life, but it will not guarantee long term success. Real, sustainable growth begins with a granular understanding of what's really going on in your industry and its sub-industries. Viguerie, Smit and Baghai guide the reader through the kinds of analyses companies should undertake to discover pockets of unmet demand in order to reach new customer segments with innovative products or solutions.(In my opinion, this book is as much about innovation as it is about growth.) The authors also offer insights on how to build a "growth architecture" by synchronizing strategy, organizational structure, management processes and communication.
" The Granularity of Growth" is highly readable in spite of the very sophisticated management concepts it introduces. The book is packed with real examples of companies that have achieved extraordinary growth through a granular understanding of their business. A must read for any executive who lies awake at night wondering how to keep the growth engine firing on all cylinders.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid guide to drive enduring performance, January 22, 2009

By 

Rebecca Clement "Publisher, Soundview Executi... (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Granularity of Growth: How to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance (Hardcover)

There's a mountain of books on the market with an avalanche of ideas about growth and growing your business. However, The Granularity of Growth stands out from the rest and that's the reason Soundview heartily endorses this book. The fact is that most books oversimplify the difficulty that organizations of all sizes face as they develop and maintain new growth opportunities - especially considering today's tough economic and competitive realities. The team of authors, all of whom are experts in the burgeoning field of "growth studies," state that the key to unlocking true growth potential is in studying the nitty-gritty details, rather than the widely-used, overly-generalized strategies that seem to be in vogue. The writers rely on extensive quantitative findings that track a myriad of corporate growth factors to provide crisp insights in the pursuit of positive-performance expansion. Few organizations can afford to ignore the pearls of wisdom contained in this book regarding the types of institutional architecture, ambition and direction that contribute best toward sustainable growth.

5.0 out of 5 stars Methodical guidebook to help large companies get larger, March 9, 2009

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Granularity of Growth: How to Identify the Sources of Growth and Drive Enduring Company Performance (Hardcover)

This is a useful, methodical book. Rather than offering general platitudes on growth and strategy, Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit and Mehrdad Baghai offer data-driven ways to generate growth. However, neither the approach nor the book are easy. The approach requires leaders to undertake hard, detailed work with rigorous honesty as they examine their companies and markets more specifically (that's where the granular detail comes in) than most will want to. The authors are firm on the necessity of maintaining this intense level of awareness as markets change around you. The book requires a bit of patience, as the authors sometimes get overly invested in tiered structures, pacing readers through different categories of growth directions and structures that become a bit too abstract and technical. That aside, anyone looking for specific ways to address growth will find this helpful. getAbstract recommends it to CEOs, strategists and students of business growth.