Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's 50 Greatest Companies

Description

What makes a business grow beyond the competition? What powers it to the top and keeps it there? 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.

Jim Stengel was the director of marketing at P&G for twenty-five years and is the founder of the Jim Stengel Company, a consulting firm. He is also a professor of marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In seven years as global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel was influenced by celebrated management writers such as Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, and Stephen Covey ... Grow stands a chance of becoming a similarly influential text for a new generation of executives * Financial Times * By combining a scientist's rigor with a storyteller's gifts, Jim Stengel has produced a brilliant, must-read book supremely suited to our times * Arianna Huffington * When you start reading Grow, you may well feel a little sceptical about the ideal and its bottom-line value. But you'll soon become intrigued - and then utterly convinced. Jim Stengel shares his beliefs and his experience with a generosity bordering on the reckless; and has the hard, clean numbers to bear his teachings out * Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP * A new, powerful model for business. ... A must-read ... for all business leaders * Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook * Grow is a tool kit for turning the power of ideals...into competitive advantage and sustainable growth * Robert A. McDonald, chairman, president, and CEO, Procter & Gamble *