Product Description

You've been charged with growing your business. Incremental growth can no longer deliver the results you need. You need truly dynamic growth and you need to achieve it without risking a hugely expensive gamble. How can you encourage innovative new ventures and pursue ambitious growth while minimizing risk?

In Discovery-Driven Growth, authors McGrath and MacMillan show how companies can plan and pan aggressive growth agenda with confidenc. By carefully framing their strategic growth opportunities, testing each project assumption against a series of checkpoints, and creating a culture that acts on evidence and learning instead of blind stumbling, companies can better control their costs, minimizesurprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects before it's too late.

Providing tools that will help you select and better assess the potential of any strategic venture, from new product lines to entirely new businesses, the authors outline a comprehensive process that lets you identify, manage, and leverage your company's full portfolio of opportunities. By reducing up-front costs and eliminating unnecessary risks, you'll be able to avoid missteps and explore more options tocreate the breakthrough growth that your business requires.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #350799 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 200 pages

About the Author
Rita Gunther McGrath is Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School.

Ian C. MacMillan is the Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. They are coauthors of MarketBusters and The Entrepreneurial Mindset.

Customer Reviews

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." Galileo Galilei

In the first chapter, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan explain that their core thesis is that companies that use conventional methodologies to pursue exceptional growth will simply not be able to accomplish growth that allows them to break out of the pack and deliver exceptional results." If so, what do they recommend? What they call "discovery-driven planning" that will guide and inform the introduction of new growth initiatives (e.g. businesses, products, services, franchises, strategic alliances, and even potential mergers and acquisitions). "Through discovery-driven planning (DDP)," McGrath and MacMillan point out, "organizations set up bold plans to pursue futures they frame, to learn where their futures lie, and to test their assumptions about those futures at the lowest possible cost."

Readers will especially appreciate McGrath and MacMillan's brilliant use of reader-friendly devices, including self-diagnostics, check-lists, figures, and tables, to identify key points. For example, a "Simple quiz to find your openness to discovery-driven growth " (Table 1-1,Page 9), several processes that can help executives to plan their firms' growth during the first steps of DDP (Pages 11-13), and "Conventional versus discovery-driven growth" (Table 1-2, Page 13) in Chapter One. McGrath and MacMillan make equally effective use of BioBarrier, a disguised version of a corporate growth project at a major corporation that illustrates both the perils and the possibilities of DDP. This material serves, in effect, as a hypothetical test case but, again, McGrath and MacMillan cleverly include the aforementioned reader-friendly devices such as the "Initial frame for BioBarrier project" (Table 4-1, Page 83), "BareBones specification for BioBarrier project (million dollars)" (Figure 4-1, Page 87), and "Steady rate expectation profile" (Figure 4-2, Page 88). It should also be noted that McGrath and MacMillan suggest "Action Steps" at the conclusion of most of the ten chapters.

In Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson suggest that, untilnow [2006], research and executive education have failed to make a breakthrough in understanding and improving IT architecture efforts. They then recall Albert Einstein's observation, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." What do the authors recommend? "The focus needs to be higher - on [in italics] enterprise architecture [end italics], the organizing logic for core business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the standardization and integration of a company's operating model...[Therefore] enterprise architecture boils down to these two concepts: business process integration and business process standardization. In short, enterprise architecture is not an IT issue - it's a business issue." In Chapter Five, when suggesting how to design the business model architecture, McGrath and MacMillan seem to agree with Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson that a specific project not only can but should be evaluated within an overall strategic framework the foundation and "the fundamental architecture of a discovery-driven plan is established with the selection of a business unit that will drive the revenue and profits of the business."

In my review of their previous collaboration, MarketBusters (2005), I noted that "the core of this book involves five strategies to create "marketbusters": Transform the customers' experience, transform your offerings, redefine profit drivers, exploit industry shifts, and consider entering (for you) new markets. No news there. The value of this book is derived from McGrath and MacMillan's explanations of (a) HOW to select the strategies which are most appropriate to your organization's current and imminent needs and (b) WHAT to do when coordinating those strategies with tactics (or `moves') during the implementation process." They urge those who read Discovery-Driven Growth to consult the list in the earlier book or visit www.discoverydrivengrowth.com to complete an exercise that identifies the key metrics that are most relevant to their own industry. In my opinion, the selection of appropriate metrics and then applying them with seamless consistency is of critical importance to any growth initiatives.

Once these initiatives are launched and begin to achieve measurable progress, how to sustain them while - meanwhile - making necessary modifications, except of the metrics? McGrath and MacMillan devote the final chapter to answering that question. To set the context within which everyone involved will pursue and commit to discovery-driven behavior, they suggest six sets of actions to be taken by the CEO and other members of the senior team. They conclude their book with an expressed hope that the information and counsel they provide will give C-level executives the processes needed to "free up the creativity" in their organization "without "going down the black hole of undisciplined innovation"; to give a division or business unit head some ideas to consider about formulating and then implementing a "stealth" strategy for bringing discovery-driven principles to bear; and to provide to a less experienced manager some techniques to help them think "more sharply and with more discipline about the things that [their] bosses are worried about." I share these fervent hopes as well as the last: "And for the entrepreneur in many of us, discovery-given growth can provide road map to a successful business future. Best of luck."

Congratulations to Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan on their brilliant achievement.

Their first book was great, this is not even worth writing a review about
I bought this book with some great expectations as the authors' first book, 'The Entepreneurial Mindset' was great. Even though their second joint work 'Market Busters' was mediocre at best, I still relied on the good quality of the first book. I wish I did not. This is even worse than mediocre.

The book starts by arguing that in today's world no company can thrive without creating new businesses. For this, they argue, you cannot rely on conventional tools. I totally agree. After reading an opening statement like this, one naturally expects new tools, new concepts and new techniques as to how to create new growth businesses in a turbulent environment like the present one. But the tools you naturally expect never arrive. Instead, you get a lot of "we did this for company X, that for company Y..we have great training programmes..we are super consultants..maybe we do not give you the tools in this book but once you BUY our services, be sure that we will give them to you..." kind of tacit advertisements. Pathetic! This is no strategy 'formulation' book nor is it a tool-kit for creating new businesses, even though they keep saying that the conventioanl tools are not good enough.

Then, at some point, you feel like this might be a strategy 'execution' book but then who needs another execution book at uncertain times like these when the most demanding business issues are finding new growth businesses and producing new demand innovations. Also, there are much much better execution books than this one, like Kaplan&Norton's book or Bossidy&Charan's book. This is a boring book with even more boring business examples, like Netflix, for example. Aren't you tired of hearing about Netflix in so many books? Once upon a time it was Starbucks everywhere, now it is Netflix or P&G everywhere.
So, my suggestion is, anyone who is after a good strategy book should definitely avoid this boring brochure-like stuff. Instead one should read the books I mention on execution and/or Adrian Slywotzky's book 'Upside' for strategy 'formulation'. I sincerely regret to have bought this book and spent my good time reading more than half of it. What a waste.