Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning

by Ram Charan

The coauthor of the international bestseller Execution has created the how-to guide for solving today’s toughest business challenge: creating profitable growth that is organic, differentiated, and sustainable.

For many, growth is about “home runs”—the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don’t happen every day and frequently come in cycles.

Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena. A surer and more consistent path to profitable revenue growth is through “singles and doubles”—small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business model.

Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone’s business—not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company’s call center handling customer inquiries and complaints to the CEO.

In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, profitable growth. For more than twenty-five years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Management, Buisness

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Ram Charan is an Indian-American business consultant, speaker, and writer resident in Dallas, Texas.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stuff on “singles” and “doubles” was really good.

[Ryan Barretto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Practical and effective ideas on driving profitable business.

I like the various examples of organizations that the author shares. I sometimes wished that he had offered a more systemic perspective to this solution.

This is a great and useful read for business leaders (irrespective of function), managers and students in their final year of graduation (irrespective of their course of study) because Profitable Growth is Everyone's business.

[Keenan Bartlett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides insightful strategies for driving success in any organization. The author's practical approach and clear examples make it accessible to professionals at all levels. This book isn't just about boosting profits; it's a blueprint for fostering a culture of growth and innovation within teams.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a solid read on avoiding the mindset of always chasing big wins in business. The examples felt similar to those in other books that focus on trying to win big, but in this case the emphasis was on the importance of staying consistent with smaller wins in order to sustain the occasional big wins.

[Esteban Mulki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cuando leí el primer capítulo sabía que iba a enamorarme de este libro. Por supuesto, el libro es más que el primer capítulo y la magia del amor se terminó ahí mismo.

10 herramientas para crecer y una idea de base sumamente poderosa: para crecer tenemos que aumentar las ventas en lugar de mirar solo hacia la reducción de costos. ¿Qué puede salir mal? Prácticamente todo.

A medida que avanzaba sobre las páginas me encontré con mucho humo expresado en términos propios para conceptos clásicos: "presupuesto de crecimiento", "venta cruzada", "máquina social" y el tremendo "marketing ascendente" que es prácticamente una tautología porque por definición, el marketing debe ser ascendente.

Otro punto bajísimo son los ejemplos, que en algunos casos pasan a ser directamente improcedentes (hay un par muy notorios en el capítulo donde se cubre la venta cruzada).

Cuando uno promete y después no cumple debe saber que la confianza se pierde. Dificilmente vuelva a leer un libro del amigo Ram Charan, que tiene títulos interesantes pero un antecedente fuerte con muy poca sustancia.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro muy interesante para abrir la cabeza y empezar a pensar en el crecimiento de la empresa. Está enfocado principalmente al operar de grandes coorporaciones y todos sus ejemplos también están dentro de esos escenarios, pero aún así es posible extrapolar las técnicas mencionadas para aplcarlas en empresas pequeñas.

Particularmente no ahonda en ningún tema en particular, sino que se hace un recorrido por las 10 herramientas que el autor considera necesarias para el crecimiento rentable. La idea principal que me queda: Es más importante el incremento de las ventas que la disminución de los gastos.

[Leader Summaries · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desde Leader Summaries recomendamos la lectura del libro El crecimiento rentable, un asunto de todos, de Ram Charan.
Las personas interesadas en las siguientes temáticas lo encontrarán práctico y útil: management, mejora de procesos.
En el siguiente enlace tienes el resumen del libro El crecimiento rentable, un asunto de todos, Cómo aumentar los beneficios de una empresa coordinando procesos, departamentos, equipos y personas: El crecimiento rentable, un asunto de todos

[Dave Applegate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charan does an excellent job describing mindsets and actions that can be implemented to drive profitable, organic and consistent long term growth. I really liked his point on shifting the focus from "hitting home runs" to hitting lots of "singles and doubles." He also does an excellent job discussing a customer centric business in unique ways from books like the Lean Startup or The Four Steps to Epiphany. However, Charan's points of view can be a bit absolutist in moments (saying things like certain strategies are NEVER good) and a bit geared too much towards corporate America.

[Ricardo Osuna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creo que algunas personas que han leído este libro han caído en el error de pensar que porque este es fácil de leer, con casos básicos, no puede aportar gran cosa al desarrollo de una empresa. Creo que es todo lo contrario. Ram Charan, como en la mayoría de sus libros, utiliza un lengua sencillo para desarrollar esquemas que pueden ser de mucha utilidad para el desarrollo de empresas de todos los tamaños y de diversos giros. Un libro que vale mucho la pena.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yes, I only read this because I had to for school. Yes, it's your basic airport bookstore business self-help nonsense. Business books like this are written like newspaper horoscopes: no matter who you are, they're designed to sound like they're just for you!

Anyway, this is far from the worst book of this sort I've read. Sort of blah, but at least it didn't have any of the disgusting proselytizing you get from a Patrick Lencioni book.

[Cumberland BlueDevil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prof Ram Charan's another great insightful book on growth. He talks about the need for committing to a growth budget (beyond cost focused traditional budgeting) and shoot for 1s and 2s rather than trying to hit home runs. Very pragmatic advice.

[John Stieven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the biggest insight was the title -- the rest of the book seemed to be a rehash of many older books I have read. What truly is amazing to me is reading about all the recent failures of leadership and management when we have so much information available. Are leaders simply lazy??

[Lori Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read book on organizational behavior and design for knowledge workers, managers, executives, and entrepreneurs.

[Ben Silver · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are in business and better yet, running the business, read this book.

[Abhijeet Lele · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will say an average read. You may skip it if you are voracious reader of management books.

[Mark Bunch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book on the subject of winning via small victories vs hitting the "home run' with new inventions. Singles and doubles get you around the bases.