January 23, 2004

Jack Covert Selects - Profitable Growth in Everyone's Business

Profitable Growth in Everyone’s Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning by Ram Charan, Crown Business, 200 Pages, $22.00 Hardcover, January 2004, ISBN 1400051525

Ram Charan is one of the most well regarded authors of business books today, as he has written many important business books in the past decade. His new book, Profitable Growth is Everyone’s Business is a great follow-up to what I consider the best of his many books, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.

Profitable Growth discusses a common problem with many business strategies: too much time is spent squeezing the cost side of the balance sheets and too little spent looking at the growth side. The solution, as Charan says, “is building sustained growth through small, day to day adaptations to changes in the market.” He also says, “growth should be everyone’s business…from the CEO to sales people, everyone has the potential to create internally generated increases in revenue.”

Internally generated increases in revenue are highly valued because they are organic. Naturally growing businesses are profitable because they are constantly building and improving their foundation, rather than hoping for growth based on unfounded goals. The author says, “many people equate growth with hitting home runs…hitting a single or double just wouldn’t be good enough. Building blocks such as new products and customer values are often given inadequate resources.” I value this approach to business because it is do-able; it reinforces the basics of running a business.

For a book to be recommended as a Jack Covert Selects, it has to meet two requirements: I have to see a need for the book and the book needs to have real world application. This book blows these two requirements out of the water. This is a book you will want to pass up and down the food chain.

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