Newswise — Babson Strategy Lecturer Peter Cohan has authored Disciplined Growth Strategies: Insights from the Growth Trajectories of Successful and Unsuccessful Companies.
The book provides leaders of large and small companies a proven comprehensive framework to think systematically about growth options and to yield practical strategies that produce faster growth.
Drawing insights from case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies, Cohan models his systematic approach to brainstorming, evaluating, and implementing growth strategies across five dimensions: Customers, Geography, Products, Capabilities, Culture. He examines each of these five growth dimensions in turn, selecting and organizing his cases to compare the growth strategies deployed successfully and unsuccessfully by large and small companies along the given dimension. In each of his five dimensional chapters, the author derives from his case analyses the key principles and processes for creating and achieving faster growth.
Cohan draws on a network of hundreds of founders, CEOs, and investors developed through his decades of consulting, authorship of 11 books, and over five years as a Forbes columnist. He shows through many compelling stories how leaders craft effective growth strategies.
Business leaders will learn the following lessons from this book:
- Achieving rapid but sustainable growth is a business leader’s most important responsibility – and leaders must approach this challenge with a mixture of vision, intellectual humility, and a willingness to experiment and learn from failure.
- The growth challenges facing companies that are currently growing quickly differ from the ones that stagnating or shrinking companies must overcome.
- Companies can achieve growth along one or more of the dimensions simultaneously – and they often expand geographically to customers in the same segments.
- Useful insights can emerge from comparing case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies pursuing similar growth strategies.
- Companies should select a growth strategy based on three factors: the attractiveness of the growth opportunity, the company’s capabilities to provide superior value to customers in the selected market, and the expected return on investment in the growth vector.
- Companies should select a growth strategy that best fits their capabilities and culture and they must enhance both to adapt to new growth opportunities.
About Peter Cohan
Peter Cohan teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to undergraduate and MBA students including courses such as Strategic Problem Solving and Strategic Decision Making. He also developed and teaches Foundations of Entrepreneurial Management for undergraduate transfer students. Since May 2002, Cohan has served as an executive-in-residence at Babson, advising teams in their consulting work with companies through Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) programs. He created and led the Hong Kong/Singapore Start-up Strategy Offshore elective for MBA students and teaches the Strategy and the CEO capstone in the evening MBA program. For undergraduates, he created and runs the Paris, Israel and Portugal/Spain Start-up Strategy Offshore electives. He has also served as a visiting professor at Barcelona’s EADA.
About Babson College
Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds®. The top-ranked college for entrepreneurship education, Babson is a dynamic living and learning laboratory where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society. We prepare the entrepreneurial leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to make a difference in the world, and have an impact on organizations of all sizes and types. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value.
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