Simply put, most entrepreneurial start-ups fail. Those fortunate enough to succeed then face a second, major challenge: how to grow. This book focuses on the key questions an entrepreneur must answer in order to grow a business. Based on extensive research of more than fifty successful growth companies, Grow to Greatness discusses the top ten growth challenges and how to overcome them. Author Edward D. Hess dispels the myth that businesses must grow or die. Growth can create value. But, too much growth too fast outstrips effective processes, controls, or management capacity. Viewing growth as "recurring change," Grow to Greatness lays out a framework for how to approach business development—and how to manage its risks and pace. The book then takes readers through chapters that explore whether the time is right to grow, how to do it, and how to manage the vital reality that growth requires the right leadership, culture, and people. Uniquely, this book aims to prepare readers for the day-to-day reality of growth, offering up the lived experiences of eleven entrepreneurs. Six workshops to assess where readers stand now and a suite of templates that will prove to be useful over time help bring the book's teachings to life. After reading this book, entrepreneurs will have a real understanding of their readiness to grow and place in the growth cycle, as well as a concrete action plan for where to take their businesses next. Many books address how to start a business, but this is a unique, go-to resource for readers who want to learn how to thrive beyond the start-up phase.

No company ever shrank to greatness, conclude Dwight Gertz and João Baptista. Drawing upon their new study of more than 1,000 large companies, the authors argue that managers must move beyond the current wave of downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering. Contrary to current management fads, they contend that companies must grow to be great. Managers now involved in downsizing must consider long-term goals for growth alongside short-term measures for slimming. Gertz and Baptista shatter popular corporate myths by revealing that growth opportunities are everywhere, across all business sectors -- even in stable industries and in companies "too big to grow." Using case studies, Gertz and Baptista analyze successful high-growth firms such as Starbucks, Staples, USAA. They examine not only the strategies followed by these companies -- customer franchise management, superior new product development, and channel management -- but also what they did to make these strategies successful. They discuss how, regardless of differences in strategic approach, the transformations achieved by these firms are based on the same three "foundations for growth": superior customer value, outstanding economics across the value chain, and excellence in process execution. They demonstrate how these three foundations work together, forming a powerful framework through which to attain corporate goals. Distilling these findings into useful tools for the evaluation of any strategy, Gertz and Baptista show how those facing the difficult task of turnaround can get back to growth. By examining improvements at four companies within the context of their growth framework, they analyze the combination of inspiration, leadership, and technique which has enabled these firms to prosper. Shifting the focus from cost-cutting to growth is a challenge that thousands of companies must now face. Gertz and Baptista have given CEO's, managers, and consultants in every industry a clear framework from which to build sustainable growth in revenues and profits. This book is a practical and colorful guide for those who want to grow to be great.

Wall Street believes that all public companies should grow smoothly and continuously, as evidenced by ever-increasing quarterly earnings, and that all companies either "grow or die." Introducing a research-based growth model called "Smart Growth," Edward D. Hess challenges this ethos and its dangerous mentality, which often deters real growth and pressures businesses to create, manufacture, and purchase noncore earnings just to appease Wall Street. Smart Growth accounts for the complexity of growth from the perspective of organization, process, change, leadership, cognition, risk management, employee engagement, and human dynamics. Authentic growth is much more than a strategy or a desired result. It is a process characterized by complex change, entrepreneurial action, experimental learning, and the management of risk. Hess draws on extensive public and private company research, incorporating case studies of Best Buy, Sysco, UPS, Costco, Starbucks, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Room & Board, Home Depot, Tiffany & Company, P&G, and Jet Blue. With conceptual innovations such as an Authentic Earnings and Growth System framework, a seven-step growth funnel pipeline, a Growth Decision Template, and a Growth Risks Audit, Hess provides a blueprint for an enduring business that strives to be better, rather than simply bigger.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

This motivational book is designed for anyone who wants to go to the highest level possible. Each chapter is filled with anecdotes as well as writing exercises tp help you process your life. The "G.R.O.W. Model" (Give, Release, Overcome, WIN) is a proven technique that will assist you in your personal as well as professional life. As you read this testimony, I encourage you to look at each of the 10 steps put forth in this book and be honest with yourself about how you will remove all negative barriers to your growth personally or professionally. So often in our lives, we attend trainings or conferences and leave thinking that we have learned nothing and have wasted our time. We often lament over the loss of funds and return home unfulfilled. I want you to approach such events differently and begin to take a new approach in life. Use this book to launch the space shuttle that is you for you are on a trajectory to fly beyond the stars. Begin today to prepare for the greatness that is inside of you waiting to burst out! Look at each step and know that with each accomplishment, you are taking another step on the stairs of success; a success defined by you and no one else. When Les Brown, one of the world's leading motivational speakers over the last 20 years, speaks of becoming a millionaire, he is speaking more of a mindset than the money. As he states, being a millionaire means doing things that make you feel like a millionaire. It could mean getting your first house or a house for your parents. It could mean going back to school when you are in your seventies or cleaning up a park in your neighborhood that you cannot stand seeing filthy. It can also be financial of course. There are a million ways to feel like a millionaire. Now turn the page and take the next step towards your greatness!

How do you measure greatness? Whereas “excellence” is about becoming the best you can be at one particular thing, greatness moves you past routine success and onto a new plateau where your achievements are more meaningful and satisfying. It is a deliberate act of finding the best in yourself and making choices from a different mindset. It’s a way of seeing a special kind of "more" in your life. And while achieving greatness inevitably leads to profit and phenomenal success in business, it's also—surprise!—a profoundly satisfying way to live. This revelatory book contains a powerful step-by-step process showing you how to: develop a clear idea of who you are and what you want • cultivate a positive new orientation from which better choices can be made • generate action in yourself and create unusual impact on others • overcome information overload • create a built-in mechanism to generate this sort of greatness consistently Filled with inspiring examples from sports and business, this book points the way to a life lived more deeply and filled with joy, passion, success, excitement, and peace.