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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 650
EAN num: 9780738203096
ISBN number: 0738203092
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: 2000-07
Publishing house: Basic Books
Sale Popularity Level: 147261
Studio: Basic Books
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Product Description:
From experts at McKinsey & Company's world-renowned growth practice comes a highly practical, field-tested approach to initiating and sustaining corporate growth
Growth unleashes benefits beyond the economic. It revitalizes organizations and invigorates the people in them, creating energy, a sense of purpose, and the glow of being on a winning team. Yet growth is often elusive, achieved at unacceptable costs, or managed in fits and starts. Based on over three years of research and application at high-performing companies around the world, The Alchemy of Growth is a comprehensive, practical approach to initiating, achieving, and sustaining profitable growth-yesterday and tomorrow.
Amazon.com Review:
Why do some companies come and go while others endure? According to McKinsey & Company, Ltd. consultants Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White, the secret to a lasting enterprise is sustained growth. In The Alchemy of Growth, the authors offer a practical guide for jumpstarting expansion and keeping it going. 'Growth is a noble pursuit. It creates new jobs for the community and wealth for shareholders. It can turn ordinary companies into stimulating environments where employees find a sense of purpose in their work,' they write. 'Growth's transformative power is akin to the alchemy of old.'
The authors describe the approaches that have succeeded in helping their corporate clients around the world to step up the pace. For instance, companies must simultaneously focus on 'three horizons' critical to growth. The very first is the current bread-and-butter of the firm; the second, the fast-developing entrepreneurial ventures; and the third, the ideas that will germinate into tomorrow's profits. The best part of the book: the real-life examples of firms that have transformed themselves from laggards to supercharged growth companies. Take Disney, for example. After founder Walt Disney's death in 1966, the company stagnated, with its theme park and film business slipping. But after Michael Eisner took over in 1984, Disney boosted its average annual returns to 29 percent, on the strength of growth in such new avenues as Disney stores, ESPN, and resort development. The Alchemy of Growth is an instructive handbook for managers interested in spurring their companies to new heights. --Dan Ring
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Rated by buyers 
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Sustained growth is the motivation of any profit-making organization. As the authors point out, few organizations achieve sustained growth. Most have really good years, and those can be followed by really poor years. The authors see most firms faltering some point in their history unable to sustain growth.
By building growth into a business plan, the authors explain a method that will call for practical growth and help to build an enduring enterprise. Regardless of the size of a business, by following the authors' advice of managing across three "horizons" at once, the company will grow successfully and, most importantly, sustain that growth.
These three horizons reflect the company's present, short-term future, and long-term future. One must be able to manage these three horizons effectively Author name:
· defending and growing core businesses
· building up new core businesses for the future
· planting the seeds that may become potential businesses for the long term.
The authors point out that managing all three of these is no easy task. There will be areas where the priorities and requirements for these three horizons will conflict. This book will help leaders manage through these conflicts.
They will also learn how to:
· overcome a company's inertia
· build momentum for and through growth
· sustain growth
Rated by buyers -
This book provides a easy-to-understand mental model for thinking about organizational growth. However, the concept of growing and managing three "horizons" of growth at the same time exhilarates and exhausts. This book could be enhanced by incorporating sustainable principles like the Triple Bottom Line: People, Planet, and Prosperity.
Rated by buyers 
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A perspective on corporate growth and change which works through the need to maintain a simultaneous focus on three 'horizons' - today's business, emerging businesses and longer term options and the implications for strategy, management and structures.
As you would expect of a book out of the McKinsey stable, this is on an issue of importance to business, is well researched and analysed and very readable and well presented. As you would also expect, it is focused on large corporates, and on strategies for their business success, as measured by exceptional growth and returns to stockholders.
It provides one important perspective on the issue of corporate growth and development, to be compared with other perspectives.
There are obvious comparisons with Collins & Porras: 'Built to Last' both in the concern with continuing exceptional performance over an extended period and in the care taken to explain the research base from which the findings are derived. However, whereas Collins & Porras are concerned primarily with values and culture, Baghai et al are primarily interested in strategies for the selection, development and management of a portfolio of businesses and the implications of those strategies for structuring, staffing and operations.
The fundamental thesis is simple and can be stated in a few propositions:
The companies that have been successful in maintaining high rates of growth with superior profitability are those that have learnt to manage well to three different time horizons at the same time - today's business, the subsequent generation of emerging businesses, and the longer term options out of which the subsequent generation of businesses will arise.
In order to develop longer term options into 'core profit engines', a series of measured steps (concerned with finding ways of profitably building core capabilities and markets) are required, which the authors call 'stairways'. In the nature of things, not all stairways will lead to future core businesses, so a variety of initiatives need to be carried forward together. Management of the 'stairways' should receive significant senior management attention.
The skills and temperaments required to manage current business, to develop new business and to search out viable future options are widely different one from the other. The key to maximising the profitability of today's business is excellence of execution. Emerging businesses require business builders - the typical entrepreneurial temperament, while the identification of future options requires lateral thinkers and visionaries.
In consequence, the style of organisation and internal culture most appropriate to each of these foci are also different. Large corporates tend to find difficulty in encompassing these very different cultures. The authors discuss in some depth the resulting issues of internal culture, recruitment, structuring and transition, and their strategic management.
The strength of the book is that the authors identify a key issue in business sucess - the development and maintenance of a vigorous portfolio of businesses over the longer term - and work through the implications with clarity and thoroughness.
The cost of that approach is that other equally significant issues are assumed or left in the background. It is necessary to balance the valuable perspective offered with others that are also important. It is also necessary to be aware of the underpinning tacit assumptions - for example, the underlying metaphor of organisation adopted by the authors appears to me to be much nearer that of the organisation as a (money) machine, than that of the organisation as an organism. There is a marked contrast with the emphasis in, for example de Geus: 'The Living Company'. This is not to say that either is wrong, only that neither is complete.
Rated by buyers -
It seems like a no-brainer that companies need to grow in order to survive or compete, and this book isn't interesting because it tells us what we already know. What's interesting about this book is that the authors do a wonderful job of taking substantial research, abstracting the trends, and rendering their findings into very clear and usable models and messages that can help most managers who are thinking about growth. It was particularly interesting for me, as I work as an ebusiness consultant for a large IT integrator and many of my customers are trying to start new staircases (as described in the book) via Internet channels and I can immediately see the applicability of Alchemy to what they're trying to do.
The book is a quick read (almost comically quick, given the price) and mercifully low on buzz words. Right now, I don't see the appendix as being particularly useful, but I may find it more so later. Annotating the bibliography would have added a lot of value.
Rated by buyers -
An useful book ! Surviving in the future requests perspectives and actions. Companies have a life cicle and gaining right to survive for a long time is not simple. So entrepreuners, directors and managers should think and act carefully for ensuryng the future of their companies, because there's not certitude of existing for decades.
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