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The development of valuable new businesses is the toughest challenge in business - far more difficult than sustaining an existing enterprise. Existing businesses benefit from inertia: customers won't switch unless they are given a good reason, few employees leave voluntarily unless their compensation falls significantly below market rates, and returns on sunk investment may persist at substandard levels as long as a company can't generate more cash by selling the assets. In contrast, rapid growth requires a dramatically superior value proposition that gives customers of other companies a reason to switch, sufficiently attractive compensation to attract large numbers of new employees, and returns on capital that draw new investors. Our own research shows that rapid growth typically requires a company to be about 20 percent better than would be required to sustain the business.

…a growth policy needs to be able to distinguish between healthy growth, fat, and cancer ― all three are ‘growth,’ but surely all three are not equally desirable.

Broadly speaking, organic growth can come from natural expansion of the core business, moves into near-in adjacent markets, and the creation of entirely new growth businesses. Companies need to have a rough estimate of their ultimate top-line and bottom-line goals, and how much growth they can reasonably expect to get from each of those three categories.

Every new business we've ever engaged in has initially been seen as a distraction by people externally, and sometimes even internally.