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The Breakthrough Company
How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers
1 of 1 copy available
Encouraged by experts such as business legend Peter Drucker and Good to Great author Jim Collins to identify the drivers that enable a company to push past the entrepreneurial phase, McFarland spent five years building and analyzing the world’s largest growth-company performance database and interviewing more than 1,500 growth-company executives on four continents. His goal was simple: to identify the secrets of breakthrough.
The Breakthrough Company is the result. Winnowing a study pool of more than 7,000 companies down to nine that have made the transition to major-player status, McFarland highlights real-world tools and myth-busting insights that can be used by anyone wanting his or her business to join this exclusive circle. Among the book’s takeaways:
• Common wisdom holds that the founders and core entrepreneurial leaders of a company must step aside for the business to reach the next level. Not true—as long as founders “crown the company” instead of themselves.
• It’s not reckless to make ever-escalating bets on your company’s future, even going nose to nose with competitors many times your size. In fact, it turns out that the only safety comes in constantly upping the ante in exactly this way.
• A Business Bermuda Triangle does exist, gobbling up companies on the verge of breakthrough. Presented here are three ways to navigate this potentially deadly hazard successfully.
• However good you are—or think you are—you can’t do it alone. Learn how to surround your company with networks of outside resources, aka “scaffolding,” and how to enlist the aid of “insultants”—people who are willing to question a firm’s existing assumptions and ways of doing business.
With powerful and specific action steps concluding each chapter—and invaluable advice on virtually every page from business leaders who’ve taken their companies to extraordinary levels of growth and profitability—The Breakthrough Company is one of the most provocative, inspiring, and instructive business books you’ll ever read.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 15, 2008 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307409829
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307409829
- File size: 2175 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 15, 2007
McFarland, consultant and columnist, sets out to explore the characteristics that enable small companies to break through the entrepreneurial stage and become big; hequotes Charles DuBois: The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. McFarlands tips for building breakthrough capabilities include expanding the strategic-development team to involve key middle managers, top salespeople, and others with potential; holding frequent and flexible strategy sessions; and executing action plans structured from initiatives that are drawn from specific, measurable goals. If a company is not continually seeking new and improved ways to serve its customer base, contain costs, and increase speed, its competitors are. The author suggests, Maybe the key job of a leader is to be an amplifier: to magnify those entrepreneurial qualities of risk-taking, character, commitment, unselfishness, and collaboration, and make sure theyre not drowned out by the increasing noise associated with scale and scope. A thoughtful perspectivefor current and aspiring entrepreneurs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)
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