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Less than a fifth of public companies have been able to consistently grow shareholder value in one of the most volatile business climates in memory, according to Accenture research. These companies know how to deliver results against current expectations, and know how to create future growth. In short, they appear able to balance today and tomorrow, when measured against multiple time horizons.

Accenture evaluated high performance in individual companies by both qualitative and quantitative measures. Despite their differences to the generalist eye, our research shows that these companies share common characteristics. They:
- Adopt innovative approaches to growth.
- Effectively allocate IT resources to drive increases in market capitalization.
- Implement integrated merger, acquisition and alliance strategies that quickly capture market and cost benefits.
- Know how to extract value from intangible assets.
- Have an extraordinary ability to sense shifts in their competitive environment, and the agility to respond with strategies and tactics that will drive the greatest return to shareholders.

Accenture calls companies that demonstrate superior mastery of these disciplines "high-performance businesses."

Trumpeted across the headlines we have all heard about how American business has been cutting costs and seeking other benefits by moving some of its business processes to locations in other countries. But as some companies like Ford and Dell have discovered, there are risks and costs to sending part of your business to an outsourced provider. Before taking action, managers can learn from the success and failures of others by first looking at each component of their value chain to help them identify and evaluate the costs and risks of outsourcing.

This inspirational book challenges the conventional wisdom that companies are engaged in a "war" for talent. Instead, the authors argue the challenge is hiring people you know you want to keep and cultivating their talent. You won't get vague prescriptions here; O'Reilly and Pfeffer make their case with compelling stories of maverick companies, from Southwest Airlines, AES, and Cisco Systems to Men's Wearhouse and New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI).

We've heard that old refrain before: Our schools would be better if only we had better teachers, and government would be better if only there were more competent civil servants. In fact, such conventional wisdom is more often than not a rationalization for poor leadership. Because the top 10 percent of any group is a finite number, it is incumbent on leaders to create conditions that produce extraordinary results from ordinary people. From that perspective, a company that creates talent and uses it well is better led than one that expends all its energy on the futile task of hiring only great people.

An excerpt from the book, Finding Fertile Ground: Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures, by Scott A. Shane.