Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies

by Jim Stengel

Great businesses naturally have many things in common: superbly designed products and services, knockout customer experiences, sustained excellence at execution, outstanding talent and teamwork, and great leadership. But there's also something else, an X factor that keeps renewing and strengthening great businesses through good times and bad.

Based on almost ten years of empirical research involving 50,000 companies, Jim Stengel, former director of marketing at Procter & Gamble, shows how the world's 50 best businesses - as diverse as Apple, Red Bull, Pampers and Petrobras - have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes.

In this, the next big idea book, Stengel deftly blends timeless truths about human behaviour and values into an action framework, to show us how by embracing what he describes as 'brand ideals', the world's best businesses can achieve incredible growth and drastically improve their performance.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 2012

Reviews

[Sivananthi T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick reading of how the most powerful and influential companies combine ideals and business profitability. Moving.

[Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is strange, how ideals, and beliefs, affect, as an organization, how we see ourselves, and how others see us. Do simple messages work? Most of these firms are American, as is most of our understanding of business; this is not surprising given, that the U.S. remains GDP wise, the largest economy in the world. Of passing interest.

[Kym Hamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was recommended to read this by a recruiter friend of mine after we'd been talking about types of companies that would be great to work for. Stengel takes his years of marketing experience and suggests an ethos for corporate success, namely that ideals are at the heart of sustained growth. He uses lots of interesting examples to demonstrate 5 core ideals and the key elements that must be in place to bring those - and ongoing profitable growth - to the fore. Unusually for me with a business book, I've marked several pages with sticky tabs so it's definitely gone back onto the bookshelf for future reference.