Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 256 pages
- Published by: Yale University Press April 28, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0300136870
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0300136876
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Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Product Review
"Stall Points is grounded in competent and compelling research. There is no fluff here. It is a cogent, practical guide to the most pressing problem today's managers face: How to sustain growth."-Clayton M. Christensen, Professor,
Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution (Clayton M. Christensen )
"Every company that sets itself a growth trajectory worries about the very real danger of stalling. What makes this critical is that most companies do not realize it even as they encounter stall points. Stall Points captures this dilemma perfectly. Based on the experience of several organizations across the world, the authors have produced a compelling piece of research. The key takeaway for me personally is the need to build an organization that will identify stall points either before or as they occur, so that corrective action can be taken to put the company back onto its original growth trajectory."-Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries (Mukesh Ambani )
"Stall Points provides a unique combination of fact-based analysis and insight from a broad range of large corporate experience. While no book can hold the answer to growth, this one provides valuable tools to help management take the critical first steps of self-assessment and root cause analysis on the road to driving change in the firm."-Mike Giersch, Vice President, Strategic Planning, IBM Corporation (Mike Giersch )
"This book was a real call to action for us at Caterpillar as we needed to break through the $20 billion stall point in our top line. I recommend this book to every business leader who wants to maintain high growth or recover from a growth stall."-David B. Burritt, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Caterpillar Inc. (David B. Burritt )
"Growth is the oxygen of any corporate enterprise, but it's very hard work-full of uncertainty, difficult questions and difficult choices. Those on the front lines can read an unlimited number of books and articles on growth, but few are as thoroughly grounded in original research, combine the best insights from both academic and consultant thought leaders, and are as littered with pragmatic examples (good and bad) from world class companies. Stall Points is both depressing and exciting. The authors unearth the root causes of the almost-inevitable growth stalls that companies experience, then show that 87% of them are self-inflicted-either strategy failures or organizational failures. Most importantly, they offer actionable ways to both anticipate and react to those circumstances."-Daniel G. Simpson, Vice President, Office of the Chairman and CEO, The Clorox Company (Daniel G. Simpson )
"The challenge of sustaining growth has bedeviled business leaders forever. In today's competitive markets, marked by the shrinking half-life of business models, the penalty for not stress-testing the foundations of your strategy continuously is swift and fearsome. Stall Points provides the data and the tools to guide this process. If ever there was a must-read, this is it."-Jim Haymaker, Corporate Vice President, Cargill Incorporated (Jim Haymaker )
"Through its extraordinarily rigorous and comprehensive analysis of growth, and what undermines it, Stall Points provides a new set of lenses through which to view this most important of topics. It also offers a brilliant, yet practical, toolset for focusing these lenses on one's own organization. It should be read and carefully considered by every executive team, board, and investor."-Robert A. Whitman, Chairman and CEO, Franklin Covey Inc. (Robert A. Whitman )
"Executives, by nature, have trouble seeing terrible news coming. Despite endless discussion and development of strategy, too many lessons are learned after the fact. What Stall Points uniquely offers is the ability to see problems before they arrive, in time to do something about them. Strategic insight before the fact is what the business world sorely lacks, and what this book offers."-Daniel O. Leemon, Former Chief Strategy Officer, Charles Schwab Corporation (Daniel O. Leemon )
"The messages in Stall Points are sobering for many of the top executives at firms I am involved with-especially those in Silicon Valley. That their success could be driven to an abrupt end caused by factors mostly under their control frightens them into renewed determination to create and exploit competitive advantage to avoid such a fate. Stall Points is for every executive who thinks his or her company is on top of the world or has did not deserve to fall from grace."-George Stalk Jr., Senior Vice President, The Boston Consulting Group (George Stalk Jr. )
"Stall Points calls attention to an overlooked attribute of the most successful companies: they take nothing for granted. This book should be required reading for leadership teams that want to stay relevant to their customers over the long run."-Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg )
"Stall Points is well-researched and clear on causes, clues, and management practices that are relevant and critical focus areas for board discussion."-Dina Dublon, Former Chief Financial Officer, JPMorgan Chase (Dina Dublon )
Product Description
Very few large companies manage to avoid stalls in revenue growth. These stalls are not attributable to the natural business cycle. Rather, careful analysis reveals that the vast majority of such stalls are the direct result of strategic choices made by corporate leaders. In short, stoppages in growth are almost always avoidable. This extensively researched book analyzes the growth experiences of more than six hundred Fortune 100 companies over the past fifty years to identify why growth stalls and to discover how to rectify a stall in progress or, even better, avoid one.
Board members and executives in companies of all sizes will find this book a practical and essential resource. Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever investigate the incidence and consequences of growth stalls in major corporations, then probe the root causes. looking at hundreds of stall points, the authors conclude that the greatest threat to a company’s growth is posed by obsolete strategic assumptions that undermine market position, and by breakdowns in innovation and talent management. The study includes a selection of practices for articulating and monitoring strategic assumptions and concludes with a self-test built around fifty “Red Flag” warning signs of an impending growth stall.
Top Four Reasons a Firm May Stall:
• Premium position captivity
• Innovation management breakdown
• Premature core abandonment
• Talent shortfall
Reader Reviews
Why and how obsolete strategic assumptions can threaten sustainable growth In this brilliant volume, Matthew Olson and Derek van Bever assert that "the assumptions a management team holds most dearly - has known so long or so well that they are no longer debated - pose the greatest danger to growth. In other words, it is not what you know that isn't so that will stop your growth run - more likely, it's what you know that's [begin italics] no longer so [end italics]." It is worth noting that assertions such as this one are based on the rigorous and extensive research Olson and van Bever conducted over a period of several years. For example, the material in Part I (The Growth Experience of Large Firms) is based on "a comprehensive quantitative analysis of more than five hundred companies that have numbered among the Fortune 100 across the pasty fifty years. As for Part II (The Root Causes of Growth Stalls) they complement the quantitative analysis with "detailed case analysis of a subset of the Fortune 100 to determine why growth stalls occur." Then in Part III (Avoiding or Recovering from Growth Stalls), Olson and van Bever examine the controllability of stall points previously discussed that leads them to the implications of what they learned for executives: "you must continually articulate and stress-test the assumptions underlying your strategy because it is the assumptions that you believe most deeply or that you held true for the longest time that are likely to provide your undoing. You may think you are currently doing this, but the odds are that you are not, and it is an oversight that you suffer at your peril." Olson and van Bever note several times throughout their narrative that it is common for an organization to stall, it is hard to see a stall coming, and it is extremely difficult to recover from a stall; also, that strategic myopia can occur at the highest executive levels even in organizations that are annually ranked among the most valuable, most highly admired, most profitable, etc. For example, 3M, American Express, Apple Computer, IBM, Rubbermaid, and Xerox. Of course, the degree of severity of consequences from a stall period varies from one organization to the next, as does the length of that period. Many of those who are thinking about reading this book may well ask, "All well and good, indeed very interesting, but how specifically can this book help me and my own organization to avoid or recover from a stall period?" Hence the importance of the last of five appendices that provides a diagnostic test for senior managers to complete. Each respondent is asked to rate each of 50 "red flag warnings of an impending doom" in terms of having No Concern, Moderate Concern, or Substantial Concern about it. In my opinion, this diagnostic test (all by itself) is worth far more than the cost of the book. Olson and van Bever also offer five foundational recommendations (in the final chapter) for executive teams that find themselves struggling to recover top-line momentum, and briefly explain the importance of each: 1. Build consensus about the sources of weakness in your core business strategy between the top management team and "skip-level" management. 2. Confront the operational and/or business model challenges in your core business that you previously have avoided. 3. For even the closest of adjacency extensions, conduct a careful "gap analysis" to identify required changes to the core business model. 4. Examine opportunity for new business models early in the new product development process. 5. Exploit "privileged insight" into customers in building new growth platforms. I appreciate the fact that after briefly identifying or suggesting a "what" (e.g. a challenge, question, problem, peril, or opportunity), Olson and van Bever devote the bulk of their attention to explaining the "how." For example, How to recognize the limits of prudent growth How to recognize a stall point How to calculate the costs of a stall period Why companies stall and how to avoid or recover from one How to take into full account various strategic factors (e.g. "premium position captivity") How to take into account various organization design factors (e.g. talent bench shortfall) I also commend them on the provision of five appendices in which they identify the companies in their sample, explain their methodology, list case study companies for stall factor taxonomy (in business markets ranging from Asset-Intensive to Tech-Intensive), provide stall factor definitions, and then conclude with the aforementioned diagnostic test in Appendix 5. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David Robertson as well as Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, Edward Lawler's Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage, Jeffrey Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management, and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management co-authored by Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.
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