Читать книгу Growing the Top Line - Cliff Farrah - Страница 7

Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I started a growth‐strategy consulting firm called The Beacon Group. Like the business world, and the entire nation, we were in uncharted waters, the economy was a wreck, and we needed a path to recovery. I thought the name was fitting because, as a sailor, I knew that beacons were a critical part of safe navigation.

We were pioneers, breaking new ground in a field we called growth strategy. This was 2001 – there was no Blue Ocean Strategy or The Innovator’s Dilemma books to guide us. No class on growth strategy was offered at B‐School. We learned through trial and error by working with clients to help them scale, codifying the growth lessons we learned along the way, and by repeating them with other client teams.

Originally written as a training tool for our employees, this book began as a tool to teach consistency, a metric of quality in the services world. There are plenty of one‐hit wonders in the business world, but we’ve always been focused on how the best of the best think about growth. Consistency was our goal and, in 2010, we began using our model to show clients how we developed our growth strategies. This model has been accepted as a standard with leading c‐level strategy practitioners at Beacon’s clients. This book contains interviews from current and prior leaders at major corporations, including Intel, Medtronic, CDW, Johnson & Johnson, Juniper Networks, Nike, Pratt & Whitney, Eaton, Motorola, SAP, Chase, Raytheon, the U.S. Army, Corning, EDS, Oracle, Crate & Barrel, Texas Instruments, The World Health Organization, General Electric, and Cisco, among others. You’ll also see learnings from successful entrepreneurs and operators of nonprofit organizations. Our model applies to every form of business.

This book serves two target audiences, although I think all growth strategists will find it valuable. Audience one is a first‐time growth strategist. This is anyone new to planning the top line, or revenue growth, of a business. Perhaps they’re an entrepreneur at a start‐up or a freshly promoted employee in a Fortune 100 enterprise. If you fall into this category, this book was designed to teach you how to think about the development of a growth strategy and to give you the tools to build your own.

The second audience is the seasoned growth‐strategy practitioner, whether you’ve been elevated to run strategy across your organization or you are looking to standardize a stale or scattered planning process. It is amazing how many companies follow a patchwork approach to strategy development and struggle to maintain quality of thought and consistency of information as they consolidate plan across their multiple business units around the world.

The past 30 years have been a wonderful journey, and I’m grateful to have had opportunities to serve clients around the world as they built and executed their growth strategies. This book shares what I’ve learned throughout my career, but especially what we’ve learned at Beacon, completing over 1,500 projects in the past 20 years for our global client base.

Please read this book more than once. I’ve tried to keep the tone conversational, but the message is layered and takes some consideration to fully absorb. The stories, the process, the method are all things that, as you gain experience, you’ll find you can revisit to find learnings that you missed when you read it the first time.