Growth is Essential

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success – Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown (Crown Business)

Let’s face it, if you’re in business growth is essential for you to continue to be in business. So the search for growth is an ongoing focus. We spend countless hours developing growth strategies and plans that are designed to get us new business and grow our bottom line.

It is that age old process that is in the spotlight in Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown’s new book, Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success. Ellis and Brown aren’t looking at growth from a traditional approach, but rather they are focused on how you can add new agility and speed to the process of growth and sprint to new business.

While the playbook for growth that the pair espouse and illustrate with “real” world examples makes total sense based on the data driven building blocks they want you to put in place, I am not certain that most businesses have the depth of business intelligence and capital to make this process work where the rubber meets the road. There is a level of sophistication and finance that tech companies and startups can bring to the table that the average small business just can’t swing.

There seems to be a “magic bullet” optimism to Ellis and Brown’s approach that I can’t see as realistic for most businesses. While some may think this is a new business Bible and go to resource, I think the take away here is that businesses do need to focus on developing a method for gathering intel on their customers, their competitors and their own product/service offerings.