go for growth!: five paths to profit and success-choose the right one for you and your company

Issues a bold challenge to business managers to commit their companies to sustained measurable growth and enduring success. Noted business author and management consultant Robert M. Tomasko details five distinct paths that can take any company, large or small, to higher levels of productivity and prosperity. Important points are fully illustrated with examples drawn from a wide variety of companies in a broad range of markets. Using a dynamic "people-centered" approach, he shows how to match these paths or game plans with the specific characteristics of your business and its key employees. These five paths include:

• Breaking the Rules: Destabilizing an industry to create new markets describes how to expand your business by violating rules or standards that are obsolete or so entrenched that no one questions them anymore, leaving the market wide open to astute individuals who can spot the telltale signs. Go for Growth tells how to identify these markets and how to seize the initiative, along the lines of Silicon Graphics and Southwest Airlines.
• Playing the Game: Excel by satisfying existing needs in growing markets explains the inherent strengths and weaknesses of market-driven companies that succeed by knowing and serving an existing market better than anyone else. Go for Growth tells you when and how to apply this game plan so effectively used by Marriott, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble.
• Making the Rules: Dominate the market by controlling its standards describes the strategies of the handful of companies that have managed to control, through research, market share, and product positioning, the markets in which they compete. This is the path of Disney, Intel, and Microsoft.
• Specializing: Thrive in niche markets details the ways companies such as Nordic Track, Rolex, and Union Carbide can seal off a portion of a market from other competitors by focusing on meeting very specific needs. Go for Growth shows the ways specialization can restore growth to companies undergoing wrenching change.
• Improvising: Profit from change by rolling with the punches describes the role of improvising as a growth path when no other good choices are available, and explains the numerous ways improvisers like IBM, Kodak, and many regional phone companies can capitalize on their flexibility to achieve profitability.
• Go for Growth drives home the point that there is no single best approach to growth for everyone by including lively, first-person accounts from managers thriving, and stumbling, in businesses following each path.

Go for Growth fully demonstrates the opportunities awaiting businesses that can successfully follow the right path for their markets and capabilities. In addition, this invaluable book explores ways managers can help focus their entire organizations on sustaining growth and increasing profitability well into the future.

With its combination of stimulating ideas and specific action plans, Go for Growth offers forward-looking managers five unique paths toward business and personal growth.

The author of the best-selling Rethinking the Corporation shows how companies of any size can achieve new growth and greater success

Five Paths to Profit and Success--Choose the Right One for You and Your Company

Go for Growth challenges business leaders to move their organizations toward sustainable growth and enduring prosperity. Written by noted author and business consultant Robert M. Tomasko, this timely book offers a detailed rationale for steady, responsible growth and outlines five energizing, "people-centered" ways to introduce a new, growth-oriented dynamic into an organization. Supported by numerous examples of how successful companies have managed growth, Go for Growth shows how to match specific options with the resources and needs of specific companies, and how to focus the entire organization on the business of success.

"Go for Growth is an important book because of the powerful, insightful way Bob Tomasko integrates personal growth, organizational change, and positive business strategy. It's a thoughtful, practical book--hard to put down, easy to apply. I think his best line is: 'Growth only happens when people grow'; that's a line I'd put on the wall of every executive's office " --Robert J. Lee, Ph.D. President, Center for Creative Leadership

"At a time when so many pundits advocate their pet silver bullet to growth, Tomasko refreshingly shuns the 'one size fits all' panacea by setting forth five sensible paths to profitable growth. He stresses that it is up to each management to sort out which path really makes sense given each company's unique situation." --Samuel M. Felton Strategic Leadership Forum

"Go for Growth will help managers to determine what they need to do and what they need to avoid." --Michael Maccoby Author of Why Work? Motivating the New Workforce

ROBERT M. TOMASKO is an international management consultant associated with Arthur D. Little, Inc., and is in great demand as a speaker at business meetings around the world. Based in Washington, D.C., he is the author of two well-known books, Rethinking the Corporation and Downsizing. His clients include BellSouth, Coca-Cola, First Chicago, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, and Toyota. He speaks at meetings of the Conference Board, President’s Association, and many major industry associations.