[.ca] How to Grow When Markets Don't (ISBN 0446692700)

New growth for old companies:
Slywotzky and Wise could have titled their new book, New Growth for Old Companies: A Comprehensive Compendium. If you've read their many previous papers and articles, you'll find the contents of this book familiar but will probably be delighted to find all those ideas and more gathered informatively in one place. The authors' audience consists of companies in mature industries struggling to grow - and to grow in a sustainable manner. Inspired by examples such as General Motors, Clarke American, and Cardinal Health, Slywotzky and Wise mix their own thoughts with others floating around the world of business ideas to come up with a strategy they call "demand innovation". I agree that typical product innovation, while retaining value, is far from the final word in achieving growth. The authors' demand-centric approach instead focuses on the customer's context in using a product or service, and satisfying that with the company's intangible wealth - customer contacts, business models, technical expertise, human capital. If you are like most customers, you have no trouble finding any number of innovative products. Your wish-list of new stuff is probably making your bank balance very nervous. Yet the experience of finding, buying, using, getting support, and other issues that surround the product itself can create enormous frustration. Slywotzky and Wise do us the favor (as businesses and customers) of bringing together a set of opportunities to grow by helping customers reduce complexity and by helping businesses make better decisions and reach their market faster - often a newly uncovered or created market. Some of the methods for companies are ensuring operational excellence, treating growth as a systematic discipline, developing lots of small ideas and a few big ones, mandating growth at the operating level, securing high-level support for growth initiatives, and building your capabilities through acquisitions and alliances. You may not find many of these ideas to be radically new, but that's no reason to ignore this book. The authors have done a fine job of gathering diverse elements of new-growth practices and putting them in a sensible framework of "demand innovation". Keep this book on the shelf next to you and pull it down next time you get that not-so-fresh feeling about your business and your markets.

Wear new glasses:
Growth has always been a challenge and passion for top management. Mature markets, fierce competition, greater expectations from customers, investors and employees contribute to setting of tough growth targets and the difficulty in attaining them. It is interesting to note that only single digit (7) percentage of companies are able to achieve double digit growth in today's markets. This book takes a closer look at some of these and the means that they adopt to achieve it. According to the authors, the conventional focus on product innovation, R & D and market penetration strategies have all hit a wall. To break free from this syndrome, companies have to adopt innovative approaches- Demand Innovation. Instead of focusing on the current offering, companies have to look from a customer perspective into the entire value chain of which the current offering could be a small part. The approach is to explore the surrounding processes, products and services. Cardinal Health Care is a good example with which the authors effectively start demonstrating this concept. Cardinal was struck on the periphery of wholesale drug distribution with shrinking growth and negligible margins. Cardinal soon realizes that for its customers, primarily big hospitals, procurement of drugs is just a part of the solution that seeks to reach the prescribed drugs to the patients' stomach. Suddenly a big opportunity for dispensing, accounting, re-ordering, billing and information processing of drugs in hospitals emerges. Cardinal decides to seize this opportunity. Through extended processes and acquisitions, Cardinal steps into the customers premises, providing them with end to end solutions in procurement, storage, accounting and dispensing of drugs. The concept looks simple , but the revenue streams are deep and margins healthy. A healthy prescription for growth. General Motors' On Star service is another success story. Instead of just delivering a machine for transportation, GM now assures safety, security and other value added services to the harassed drivers on the road. It is now a part of the customer throughout the product's useful life enjoying a steady stream of revenues, with higher margins and delighted customers. An example where communications and information technology is used to wrap value added services to an otherwise routine product delivery. The book is split into logical parts and includes chapters on the role of senior managers, unlocking hidden organizational assets like customer contacts, technical expertise, process excellence and a framework to put the ideas into practice and thereby manage growth over an extended timeframe. Look through the glasses of Demand Innovation and growth will appear closer and bigger. Recommended reading for managers across all industries.

Surprisingly Useful:
I am very cynical about business books. I typically read two or three chapters and then put them down. Frankly, I think most of them are junk. They state the obvious about age-old management problems. They also tend to be obsessively focused on the internal dynamics and structure of a company. I took a chance with this book after hearing Mr. Slywotzky on the radio and realizing that I still had a decent balance on an Amazon gift certificate. As the owner/operator of a small wire manufacturing company, the messages about the problems of commoditization and global overcapacity hit home with me. My company has always focused on staying in niche businesses that were not quite large enough to be of interest to larger manufacturers. It worked well for literally decades until about a year and a half ago when we found that a certain "small" product line was not too small to escape the attention of some mainland Chinese businesses. After taking a 60% gross margin haircut (Ouch!!!) to retain the business, I started to become very scared. At this same time in another product line, we began manufacturing some equipment to more easily dispense an oscillated wire product. We luckily decided to lease this machine rather than sell it, and it has become a lynchpin in our ability to establish and maintain a dominant position in this market. As this machinery has evolved, it also became the rough outline of a business model that I continue to try to pursue. This book is a very good refinement of my rough idea plus a lot more. I intend to try to use the authors' ideas to think about a new product line that has some disruptive elements to it(yes, I think that Clayton Chritensen is worthwhile, too). I may just like this book because they are preaching to the choir, and I feel that I have arrived at a lot of the same conclusions, albeit in much rougher form, on my own. One thing that I do know is that all the games of incremental, internal change are not enough when mainland China shows up in your backyard. P.S. - One thing the authors' don't touch on much, but that should be noted is that the ones who are most responsible for commoditizing your products are your own customers. You can be sure that the bigger they are, the more sophisticated the sourcing organization that they have in Asia.

Another thought provoking book from Slywotzky:
I frequently refer to Adrian Slywotzky's previous books as we respond to a rapidly changing market environment among our software customers, and found How to Grow to be a very useful source of new ideas. Slywotzky and co-author Rick Wise concisely frame the growth challenge faced in many industries today, and help the reader in identifying several tangible options for driving revenue and profitability, even in the current market. The overall format is familiar to readers of Slywotzky's Profit Zone: The first chapter describes the challenge and suggests a response. The middle chapters provide fresh case studies that illustrate how companies across a range of industries have successfully overcome declining growth trends in their traditional business model. The final chapters bring together the common themes from the case examples, and construct an initial set of tools that a leadership team can use can use to identify tangible new opportunities in their own business. The factors driving the growth challenge--- maturity and commoditization of many key product lines, decreasing returns to new product and line extension investment, increasing saturation of new geographic markets, limited remaining industry consolidation opportunity in many markets, to name a few-are becoming well understood. Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard frequently writes that even the tech industry is waking up to find that many more customers care about products being cheaper than being faster. Slywotzky and Wise don't dwell on this topic, but encourage the reader to ask which drivers may be slowing growth in their own industry. I found the examples of "demand innovation" to be particularly helpful. These are drawn from a range of industries, presumably including several of Slywotzky's and Wise's consulting clients. Many examples are industries seldom used as case studies on the business speaker circuit, including check printing, lawn care equipment, and automobiles. The fresh material is very instructive. It is quite likely that the reader will find a case example that provides a close analogy to his or her own business. As with the Profit Zone, the book concludes by providing an outline and set of tools of how to engage an organization in a process to define their own growth challenge and identify actionable responses. It doesn't try to be a recipe book, but it's a very helpful "preflight check list", which increases the likelihood that a valuable opportunity isn't overlooked. The menu of options emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer structure, the customer's activity chain around the product, and the value of the information created in the interaction with the customers. Even companies that have implemented effective downstream business models are likely to find ideas that help extend the creativity in identifying new opportunities. I read through the book quickly to understand the major themes and keep it handy as a reference when developing new initiatives.

A worthwhile Read:
This book is very good, filled with useful ideas. The authors analyze companies from a variety of industries, many of which faced low growth or no growth markets, and identify the innovations in thought and practices that laid the foundation for future, sustained growth. They provide the kind of ideas, grounded in real-world examples, that will help you to find and apply new approaches to trigger growth in your business. In the tradition of other good books, this book prompts you to ask the right questions, ending each chapter with a series of questions to help you to capitalize on your business' unique strengths and hidden assets. A worthwhile read.