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How the Growth Outliers Do It I recently read “How the Growth Outliers Do It” (Harvard Business Review, Jan – Feb, 2012) by Rita Gunther McGrath, a Professor at Columbia Business School. She and her colleagues conducted research to find out what makes high growth companies different.

How Nike Drives Growth As the late great former Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt would most certainly agree, “People don’t want to buy athletic shoes and apparel. They want to become better athletes or feel like one.”

Do You Want to Chase a Hunch or Rely on a Promise? Many people are fond of saying that “innovation begins with a good idea.” The problem with this seemingly obvious statement is that it’s not true. At least, not if you want to make innovation a predictable and repeatable business process.

First, Define the Problem “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding the solution.” – Albert Einstein

The Only Hope For Sustained Growth Do you want to be the master of your technology for which you will seek markets, or do you want to be the master of your markets for which you can create customer-satisfying solutions?

Growth Strategy Made Simple Through Innovation Study after study has shown that the key to successful innovation and growth is having a clear understanding of customers’ unmet needs to guide the innovation process. Yet many leaders struggle with how to differentiate, innovate and grow because they don’t know which of their target customers’ needs remain …

The Purpose of Business “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” – Peter F. Drucker  Creating and keeping a customer is only possible if you are satisfying a customer need better than other competitive options. Innovation and growth requires understanding the customers’ needs in order to deliver superior value. It’s hard …

Marketing Malpractice is Preventable According to researchers at John Hopkins University, the biggest mistake doctors make is misdiagnosing patient problems. It’s estimated that misdiagnosing errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 people each year and resulted in nearly $39 billion in malpractice claims paid out from 1986 – 2010. While “misdiagnoses …

Keeping the End in Mind I recently flipped through an old copy of the book with the understated title, “Successful Large Account Management,” by Miller, Heiman with Tuleja.  The opening to the chapter on setting strategic goals is so good and relevant to creating value for customers, I wanted to reprint it here verbatim.

“Just do it.” I love this Nike slogan. It conveys a can-do attitude that encourages me to stop procrastinating, get off the couch, and take action! But, just do what, exactly? Take what action? If you want to drive growth through innovation, how do you know where to focus and what to do? There a lot of companies “just doing it” and most of them are just failing! In many cases, entrepreneurs are wasting time and money pursuing the flawed approach of launching a minimally viable product and “failing faster” before they have clarified the market need. This is a huge waste of time if you don’t know what the customer is trying to get done first. Let’s take a look at how Nike is winning and what we can learn from them.