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Recently, some bestselling management books have focused on providing a recipe for greatness, while others have sought to unlock the secrets of long-term success. But a detailed analysis at the intersection of the two, one that explains how some companies manage to achieve repeated peaks of business performance, has been missing — until now.
Accenture’s Paul Nunes and Tim Breene have found that what matters is not just climbing your current S-curve, which is what you do to reach the top of a single successful business. Instead, they emphasize the equal importance of the moves you must make on the way to your next business; that is, making the jump to your future S-curve.
Jumping the S-Curve reveals crucial insights for making such transitions, including:
• Why traditional strategic planning won’t allow you to find the “big-enough” market insights that are critical to superior performance • Why your top team must be refreshed before performance starts to wane • Why you need much more talent than you think, especially “serious talent” that will find you worthy of their time
Filled with original practical advice, Jumping the S-Curve demystifies how companies can thrive with one successful business after another, through both good times and bad.
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“Jumping the S-Curve presents a nice overview of top performing companies and reminds product development practitioners of the keys to success in marketing, technology, and teams. Especially recommended for senior management who are currently riding the S-curve of financial growth, this book can help firms plan for a more innovative future.” — Journal of Product Innovation Management
“… For organizations of all types and sizes that face the challenge of sustaining growth and relevance and avoiding stagnation, this accessible book offers an invaluable guide. Supported by research data, illustrated with numerous case studies, and infused with powerful personal insights it is highly recommended…” — IEDP.com (International Executive Development Programs)
“… The book spectacularly trashes many management myths, from the over-dependence on scale as a means to growth to choosing between high growth and high profit to even that old bromide about delayed gratification after years of effort. Stimulating and full of practical advice and cases, Jumping the S-Curve, should be mandatory reading for all business executives. My recommendation: Get a copy for yourself and present one to your CEO…” — CIO India
"…This is an excellent training manual for leaders of both large and small companies..." — Fort Worth Star Telegram
“Jumping the S-Curve addresses all the challenges corporations face in sustaining a growth trajectory. It provides a comprehensive toolkit to help you keep your business from stagnating.” — Tom Stemberg, Managing General Partner, Highland Consumer Fund, and Chairman Emeritus and Founder of Staples, Inc.
“The cycle of a winning business idea powering a business to dominate its peers followed by peaking as the model is eroded by a new idea appears near universal. The book analyzes thoroughly, with numerous examples from Accenture research, how great companies have replicated their performance over multiple cycles, replacing themselves rather than being replaced by others.” — Mark Moody-Stuart, former Chairman, Anglo American plc
“The book debunks many management myths, most notably the obsession with scale as panacea for sustainable growth. Instead, it urges companies to jump from one growth curve to another for sustained value creation… Practical, granular, stimulating, and replete with real cases of high performers.” — R. Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons
“Few books do for managers what Jumping the S-Curve does: it provides a data-driven and context-rich analysis of what high-performing companies do to stay high performers even as their markets inevitably change, new capabilities are required, and profitable growth remains important.” — Frank V. Cespedes, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School
“Whether the practice is in government, private, or nonprofit, the principles remain the same. These are powerful ideas based on research and informed, reflective thinking supported by data and personal insights. Jumping the S-Curve is a very important book for leaders committed to operating on the cutting edge of excellence. A good book.” — Gordon R. Sullivan, General, U.S. Army (retired), and former Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
“This book provides organizations ways and means to stay ahead. It lends insight into the various stages of business growth and the actions that need be taken at various stages to remain on top. The authors conclude that high performance is about outperforming rivals again and again, even as the basis of competition in an industry or market changes. These will be possible only if an organization keeps a tab on understanding the hidden S-curves namely of competition, capability and talent, while avoiding knee-jerk reactions like retrenchment and belt tightening, which erode the chance for a recovery.” — Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, CIO-Global of Jubiliant Life Sciences
About the Author
Paul Nunes is the Executive Director of Research and an executive research fellow in the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business. He is the coauthor the award-winning book Mass Affluence and nearly 100 articles in academic and business publications. Tim Breene is Accenture’s former Chief Strategy and Development Officer and current head of the company’s digital marketing initiative. Breene and Nunes coauthored the Harvard Business Review article “The Chief Strategy Officer.”
Product Details
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (February 24, 2011)
Paul Nunes is a consummate student and thought-leader of high performance business. His research in high performance business has helped shape Accenture's strategic vision as well as its critical imperatives for change for well over a decade. He currently serves as the Executive Director of Research of the company's global think and act tank, the Accenture Institute for High Performance. His leading edge ideas and business insights have resulted in scores of articles and book chapters on marketing and business strategy, which have been featured in top publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, Conference Board Review, and Wired among many others, as well as many of the world's top newspapers and magazines.
In addition to coauthoring the award-winning book MASS AFFLUENCE: 7 New Rules of Marketing to Today's Consumers, Paul has recently coauthored JUMPING THE S-CURVE: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top and Stay There. JUMPING THE S-CURVE, the culmination of over a decade of Accenture research on high performance business, shows how companies can avoid fatal growth stall and thrive by leaping from one successful business to another.
Paul's foray into the shifting landscape of high performance business began with his education at Northwestern University, where he earned both his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and his Master of Science degree from the Kellogg School of Management. Since joining the company in 1986, he has also directed research for Accenture's Technology Assessment Group, a think tank aimed at forecasting elements of IT evolution most relevant for business, and has led a global technology support group before helping found the Accenture Institute for High Performance. His research has earned him numerous invitations to speak at top business schools (including Harvard, MIT Sloan, Wharton, Dartmouth, and INSEAD), a trusteeship of the Marketing Science Institute, and a U.S. patent for his method of improving companies' innovation processes. His work on Accenture's High Performance Business marketing campaign received the 2006 Bronze Anvil award from the Public Relations Society of America.
Paul writes and consults, and works on his recent passion of piano playing, from his adopted home city of Boston.
The S-Curve concept is central in business strategy and often used as a way to describe leaps between classes of technology. Its concept is simple: new things start out slow, and then scale rapidly, the taper off with each action defining the bottom (incubation), middle (growth), and top (stabilization to trailing off) parts of a market.
The idea behind the S-Curve is not new, but Nunes and Breene take this simple model and use it as a way to explain the complexities of high performing companies. The result is a book that is has deep and provocative ideas blended with many examples to influence the way you think about your business, what you are doing and where you may need to change.
The book is more description than prescription. This is refreshing after many books that claim a single path to success, particularly those offered by consultants. Both Nunes and Breene are executives at Accenture but manage to provide a solid business book rather than a 200 page marketing brochure. This is a welcome addition to strategy and management thinking.
This is a book aims to shape senior executive thinking so rather than telling the reader what to do, they encourage the reader to think and then act on that thinking. The audience knows that while there are patterns of success every company achieves and sustains success in their own context.
The core of the book, and its big idea, is to recognize that there are really three S-curves facing any company. The financial S-Curve that describes how a company makes money. The distinctive capability S-Cure is the second curve. It describes the combination of your product/offerings, processes, technologies etc. The talent S-Curve is the third curve describing the pipeline of leaders.... The fact that there are three curves and that they proceed at different rates and in different relationships is the core of this book. Chapters 6,7 and 8 address each curve and form the heart of this book.
The authors provide a well-researched book that recognizes that others have looked at the issue of sustained high performance before. They recognize works from Jim Collins, Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore and others and provide a new view on the fundamentals of high performance. Nunes and Breene go beyond providing simplistic definitions of success and the implied advice that all you have to do is ape what others are doing and success is yours. Rather they offer a framework for understanding what is going on, how leaders have managed those dynamics and how you can understand why it seems that companies at the peak of their earnings potential suddenly seem to fall so fast.
Other major ideas in this book include:
A market based view of strategy and organizational success, which is unique as most books lately concentrate on the company from the inside. This book recognizes that what you do shapes and is shaped by the market and the three S-Curves give you a way to connect the two.
Big-enough market insight - which is a pragmatic and actionable view on market, wants and needs that goes beyond traditional views of business intelligence.
Discussion of the issues of scaling the enterprise - a topic that causes many people to fail and is rarely discussed as part of strategy and business leadership in a world of bigger must always be better.
Competency in terms of a value based view on competency and its role in creating new opportunity rather than exploiting current operations and success.
These and other ideas make for an insightful and impactful book. A word of caution, the first chapter is a little long and academic, and you should not judge the book by it alone. There are other minor omissions, for example, technology is not prominent in the book, but once you understand that the book is looking at broader issues of strategy and market success then you can recognize and cover the gaps.
This is an uncommon book in a world of me-to/quick recipes for success. This book provides some foundational ways of thinking about strategy and success rather than directing you to a recipe and single way to view the world. The idea of the S-curve is nothing new, but Nunes and Breen have taken a simple idea and applied it to explain and diagnose the complex behavior of successful companies.
Jumping the S-curve is recommended for managers and business unit heads who want to understand more about the deep forces shaping their success in the market.
Strengths
The book is a business discussion rather than a consulting `how to' or marketing book. The authors make their argument as much though applying their ideas, as ways to look at success and struggle than making unsupported assertions of the way things must be.
The book makes extensive use of about a dozen case studies and more than twenty other examples. Many of these examples are of well-established companies that you can see in a new light. For some readers this will seem to be a problem, however recognize that the book seeks to describe companies that have sustained high performance so therefore recent successes do not qualify.
The book addresses issues of culture, competence and leadership from a pragmatic perspective rather than seeing them as ethereal or some how remote.
Challenges
The book is a hybrid between a more academic project that wants to share research results, a way of thinking about performance and providing advice on how to reshape your thinking. This causes some gaps in some areas, for example the presentation of study data, or going deep into cases as there simply is not room enough to cover everything. Recognizing these, limitations up front enable you to concentrate more on the key ideas and get more from the book.
The authors repeat a number of the case examples in the book to illustrate different aspects of Nunes and Breene's argument. On the surface this seems like the authors have only a few new ideas, however when you consider their idea that high performance requires navigating all three S-curves, the use of a single case to illustrate multiple points is more realistic and helpful.
The book is more about understanding the S-Curves and their impact on the organization than a recipe to jump them. Those looking for a quick answer will see this as a limitation, however the authors rightly point out that each jump is unique to your company; understanding the need to make a jump and the fundamentals behind it are universal.
Not every idea in the book is new and in fact, the authors do an admirable job highlighting others works. However, the combination of ideas and their incorporation into a framework that we all know is helpful and gives the executive a way to make sense out of the factors driving high performance.Read more ›
As a former CEO, I found jumping the S-curve to be an essential read for leaders expected to deliver long term earnings growth and greater shareholder value while dealing with all of the challenges associated with increased competition, pricing pressures, lack of good talent, maturing markets and a rapidly changing business environment.
Breene and Nunes do a great job setting the stage, drawing on years of Accenture research to define the essentials of a high performance business and the building blocks of climbing an S-curve (business maturity cycle) using a number of very relevant examples.
They explain in careful detail the bigger hurdle of replicating the S-curve over and over to create long term value for shareholders. I found their explanation of the visible financial indicator of an S-Curve and the three hidden S-Curves (serious talent, distinctive capabilities, superior market focus) to be of greatest interest mainly because I ran into each as a CEO and didn't fully understand the correlation or impact each could potentially have on my business until reading this book.
Even more valuable to me was the importance of continuously generating ideas across the organization and creating a new business generation factory that filters out bad ideas and transforms good ones into future S-Curves for the company.
I highly recommend this book to anyone building a new company or looking to jump the S-Curve in a maturing business. I am already recommending it to my friends and implementing its principles in my business.
The title of this book refers to pattern of consistently elevating ("jumping") a company to progressively high levels of achievement. As I began to read Paul Nunes and Tim Breene's brilliant book, I was reminded of the fact that most all-state high school athletes begin at the bottom of the depth chart of their college and university teams, and, that most All-Americans also begin at the bottom of the depth chart, when drafted by professional teams. As Nunes and Breene explain, the S-curve refers to "a common pattern in which a successful business starts small with a few eager customers, grows rapidly as the masses seek out the new offering, and eventually peaks and levels off as the [given] market matures." Now what?
Today, faster than ever before, the tendency is to fall behind the competition, shrink, and eventually go out of business or (on occasion) be acquired. Nunes and Breene cite a work by Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (first published in 1962 and now in its Sixth Edition) in which Everett demonstrates how the process of an innovation takes on the shape of the letter S: early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Here's the challenge: How to achieve repeated peaks of high performance?
As Nunes and Breene define it, "High performance is the consistent and enduring surpassing of peers in revenue growth, profitability, and total returns to shareholders, across business and economic cycles, often across generations of leadership, measured by widely accepted financial metrics." They also make assertions that challenge conventional wisdom. Here are five:
o High performance is not dependent on industry factors of the general health of an industry. o Industry-leading scale is not a requirement for high performance.... o Consistently outperforming competitors in both growth and profitability is a competitive reality today and a hallmark of high performance. o The benefits of pursuing high performance can accrue well before actual operating measures improve. o Even above-average performers have a lot to gain from becoming high performers.
In this book, Nunes and Breene provide a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective program by which to climb and then jump a series of S-curve timeframes. Of course, the nature and extent of the program as well as specific details are determined by a company's needs, interests, strategic objectives, and resources. Nunes and Breene provide a wealth of counsel that will help business leaders to make their determination when modifying the program to the given circumstances.
However, now more than ever before in what has become a ferociously competitive global marketplace, change is the only constant. Business leaders would therefore be wise to keep in mind the Yiddish insight, "Man plans and then God laughs." When concluding their book, Nunes and Breene briefly describe many of the disruptors "that could change the competitive landscape and turn industries upside down in coming years":
1. Business analytics 2. Digital marketing 3. Cloud computing 4. Consumers in emerging markets 5. Mobility 6. Global talent scarcity 7. Smart infrastructure solutions 8. Sustainability
These and other "disruptors" could radically change the configuration and dynamics of S-curves as well as what is necessary to "jump" from any of them and then begin the laborious process of achieving high performance prior to the next "jump" that may well be much more difficult than any of its predecessors. My hunch, only a hunch, is that it will be. Business leaders who read this book and then apply effectively what they have learned from it will gain a significant, perhaps decisive advantage over those who don't.Read more ›
