Marketbusters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth

Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities

YOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth--or don't. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive?

In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan identify powerful strategic moves they call "MarketBusters"--approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry, upend conventional competition, and ultimately deliver blockbuster growth.

Based on insights from an extensive three-year study, McGrath and MacMillan describe forty proven marketbusting moves and outline five overall strategies companies have used to drive new growth:

- Change the customer's total experience: Make it simpler, faster, or more beneficial for customers to buy from you

- Reconfigure your products and services: Transform your offerings to make them clearly superior to competitors'

- Redefine your business and associated key metrics: Change how you do business or how your customers do business in ways that dramatically boost performance

- Anticipate or exploit industry shifts: Capitalize on changes before competitors do

- Create a new market space: Trigger the emergence of a new market

Every marketbusting move is illustrated in practice through vivid company examples--including cautionary tales that alert you to potential pitfalls you may encounter. Action-oriented tools and checklists provide concrete guidance in finding opportunities across your own business platform, executing your chosen move successfully, and exploiting new opportunities to maximize their bottomline impact. The book also provides guidelines for avoiding common implementation challenges and for developing the organizational alignment needed to smooth execution.

New opportunities for explosive growth are waiting to be unleashed. MarketBusters is the field guide you need to develop a reliable, robust approach to fueling continuous, profitable growth.

Rita Gunther McGrath is an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. Ian C. MacMillan is the Fred Sullivan Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. They are coauthors of The Entrepreneurial Mindset (HBS Press, 2000).