How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.
Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets.
Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers. Their inspiring lessons can help you learn how to:
• Make consumers and customers the boss, not the CEO or the management team
• Innovate to grow a mature business
• Develop higher growth, higher margin businesses
• Create new customers and new markets
• Revitalize a business model
• Reach outside your own business and tap into the abundant brainpower and creativity of the world
• Integrate innovation into the mainstream of your managerial decision making
• Manage risk
• Become a leader of innovation
We live in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness, and the very real threat of commoditization. Innovation in this world is the best way to win—arguably the only way to really win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of everyone in a leadership position and the integral, central driving force for any business that wants to grow organically and succeed on a sustained basis.
This is a game-changing book that helps you redefine your leadership and improve your management game.
*Starred Review* Blessings to Procter & Gamble—or, more exactly, its chairman and CEO, A. G. Lafley. Together with Charan, author of Know-How (2007) (and the most probable successor to management guru Peter F. Drucker), he defines, describes, draws examples of, and delineates how innovation became a part of not only the behemoth consumer-packaged-goods company but also part of Lego and Nokia (among others). Lafley is remarkably candid; the story of his “surprise” ascent to CEO-dom in 2000, taking over from Durk Jager, is the story of transformation. A number of commandments accompanied the company’s innovationcentric strategy: the consumer is boss, inside and outside cocreation is encouraged, the innovation process is tangible (and must be followed), and risks can be managed. Most important is his emphasis on human interaction as the key; even better, the last section focuses exclusively on developing a culture of innovation, from promoting the rules of brainstorming to the desired attributes for employees and leaders: courageous, connected and collaborative, curious, open. Sidebars are worthy of posting on a bulletin board; in fact, this is a sustainable reference on innovation that will be hard to beat. --Barbara Jacobs
Review
“A. G. Lafley has made Procter & Gamble great again.”
—The Economist
“Of all the firms on the 2007 ranking of the ‘World’s Most Innovative Companies,’ few are more closely associated with today’s innovation zeitgeist than . . . Procter & Gamble . . . now famous for its open approach to innovation.”
—BusinessWeek
“Lafley brought a whole lot of creativity and rigor to P&G’s innovation process.” —Fortune magazine
“A. G. Lafley has reenergized a venerable giant . . . with a style and energy that will be the subject of business school cases for years to come.” —Chief Executive magazine
“The proof of Lafley’s approach is plain enough. . . . P&G has not only doubled the number of new products . . . but also more than doubled its portfolio of billion-dollar brands and its stock price.”
—U.S. News & World Report
“Ram Charan is the most influential consultant alive.”
—Fortune magazine
“Ram has this rare ability to distill meaningful frommeaningless.”
—Jack Welch
“Among the world’s most sought after CEO advisers.”
—BusinessWeek
“Ram Charan is my ‘secret weapon’ . . . constantly providing depth to issues, not just answers.”
—Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications
“Ram Charan knows more about corporate America than anyone.”
—Dick Harrington, CEO of The Thomson Corporation
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