Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business

by Tiffani Bova

Overview

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

Do you know the best way to drive your company's growth? If not, it's time to boost your Growth IQ.

Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business's performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you'll discover in Growth IQ, there are just ten simple—but easily misunderstood—paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context.

Tiffani Bova travels around the world helping companies solve their most vexing problem: how to keep growing in the face of stiff competition and a fast-changing business environment. Whether she's presenting to a Fortune 500 board of directors or brainstorming over coffee with a startup founder, Bova cuts through the clutter and confusion that surround growth.

Now, she draws on her decades of experience and more than thirty fascinating, in-depth business stories to demonstrate the opportunities—and pitfalls—of each of the ten growth paths, how they work together, and how they apply to business today. You'll see how, for instance:

  *  Red Bull broke Coca-Cola and PepsiCo's stranglehold on the soft drink market by taking the Customer Base Penetration path to establish a foothold with adventure sports junkies and expand into the mainstream.

  *  Marvel transformed itself from a struggling comic book publisher into a global entertainment behemoth by using a Customer and Product Diversification strategy and shifting their focus from comic books to comic book characters in movies.

  *  Starbucks suffered a brand crisis when they overwhelmed their customers with a Product Expansion strategy, and brought back CEO Howard Schultz to course-correct by returning to the Customer Experience path.

Through Bova's insightful analyses of these and many other case studies, you'll see why it can be a mistake to imitate strategies that worked for your competitors, or rely on strategies that worked for you in the past. To grow your company with confidence, you first need to grow your Growth IQ.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525534402
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	339,234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. She spent ten years at Gartner, the world's leading IT research and advisory firm as a distinguished analyst and research fellow. Her cutting-edge insights have helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. This is her first book.

Table of Contents

Foreword Geoffrey A. Moore xi

The One Thing is-It's Never Just One Thing 1

Path 1 Customer Experience 11

Story 1 Sephora: A Beautiful Experience 18

Story 2 Shake Shack: Radical Hospitality 24

Story 3 Starbucks: Losing the Soul of the Past 28

Putting It All Together 34

Path 2 Customer Base Penetration 37

Story 1 Red Bull: A Thai Pharmacist and an Austrian Entrepreneur Walk into a Bar 43

Story 2 McDonald's: Ready, Set, Breakfast 50

Story 3 Sears: Uprooting Retail 56

Putting It All Together 66

Part 3 Market Acceleration 69

Story 1 Under Armour: Sweaty T-Shirts 74

Story 2 The Honest Company: Setter Living Through Chemistry 81

Story 3 Mattel: Toys Will Be Toys 89

Putting It All Together 96

Part 4 Product Expansion 101

Story 1 Kylie Cosmetics: Keeping Up with Kylie Jenner (#KUWKJ) 106

Story 2 John Deere: And the "Beef" Goes On 112

Story 3 Blockbuster: "Be Kind, Please Don't Unwind Our Business" 117

Putting It All Together 123

Path 5 Customer and Product Diversification 127

Story 1 Marvel: Superhero Saves the Day 133

Story 2 PayPal: Banking on the Future 140

Story 3 LEGO: Coming Apart, Brick by Brick 145

Putting It All Together 150

Path 6 Optimize Sales 155

Story 1 Salesforce: Four Men and Two Dogs 162

Story 2 Walmart: The Ultimate Retail Matchup 168

Story 3 Wells Fargo: A Rhyme Is Not a Reason 175

Putting it AM Together 180

Part 7 Churn

Story 1 Spotify: Winning Playlist 185

Story 2 Netflix: Twenty Years Old (and Counting) 199

Story 3 Blue Apron: Too Much on the Plate 205

Putting It All Together 211

Path 8 Partnerships 215

Story 1 GoPro: Adrenaline Junkies 221

Story 2 Airlines: The Friendly Skies 227

Story 3 Apple: Killing Me Swiftly 233

Putting It All Together 237

Path 9 Co-Opetition 241

Story 1 Fiat Chrysler, BMW, and Intel: Joining Forces 246

Story 2 Wintel: Attack of the Clones 251

Story 3 Cisco-VMware-EMC: Better Together? 256

Putting It All Together 261

Path 10 Unconventional Strategies 263

Story 1 TOMS Shoes: Heart and Sole 272

Story 2 Lemonade Insurance: When Life Gives You Lemons 279

Story 3 Grameen Bank in Bangladesh: On Purpose 286

Putting It All Together 291

Knowing When To Jump 294

Amazon Case Study: Staying in Day One 302

Acknowledgments 309

Notes 312

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

"A worthy successor to Michael Porter, Bova's book is that rare gift: it opens doors for new ideas and new actions. No glib answers here, simply hard-won wisdom that will provoke big changes for organizations large and small." —SETH GODIN, author of Linchpin

“Too many companies foster cultures of burnout in the pursuit of short-term growth as an end in itself. Smart growth is sustainable growth and Tiffani Bova shows us how to maintain it by building a purpose-led culture and leveraging, instead of sacrificing, the dedication of your people." —ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, Founder & CEO of Thrive Global, Founder of Huffington Post
 
"We all want our business to grow, but how can we make that happen? Fortunately, Tiffani Bova is here with answers. In this smart book, she reveals ten growth paths — from creating an inspiring customer experience to disrupting business as usual. And she backs her findings with solid data and examples from thriving companies. You’ve got a choice: Tread the old paths or follow Bova into the future." — DANIEL H. PINK, author of When and Drive

"I have not had a book impact me like this one since Collins' Good to Great came out in 2001. When a book has just what you need when you need it, it becomes like a good friend, a counselor and mentor that helps you get unstuck. I originally had the audio book and loved hearing it in Tiffani's voice but had to buy the book too so I could write all over the margins. Brava Tiffani Bova. Brava!" —NANCY DUARTE, CEO and author of Illuminate

“Tiffani Bova has a knack for rendering complex insights in clear, elegant prose. Growth IQ tackles the biggest question in business.”—MARTIN LINDSTROM, author of Buyology and Small Data
 
“I LOVE this book. PERIOD. Growth IQ has a crisp, clean, and invaluable superstructure. And it is well written. Those things are great, but not the basis for my love affair. The love comes from: Stories. Stories. Stories. Ten sound strategies, thirty compelling, memorable stories—from Starbucks and McDonald's to Under Armour and Red Bull. If these stories don't inspire you and add a ton to your stockpile of personal intellectual capital, I don't know what will. Bravo Tiffani Bova!” —TOM PETERS, author of In Search of Excellence
 
"Whether you’re planning to disrupt an industry or protect your company from competitors, GROWTH IQ shows how urgent it is to choose the right path. This choice can be overwhelming but Tiffani simplifies your options into ten proven paths and empowers you to embark upon the right one for you with confidence…and results." —WHITNEY JOHNSON, Thinkers50 Management Thinker, author of Disrupt Yourself​
 
"This book captures the essence of how to consistently grow an enterprise through relentless customer focus. Tiffani Bova is the quintessential story teller, leading us through a framework that gives structure to our growth strategy.... A guide book for all leaders to inspire those around them."—NAOMI SIMSON, Shark Tank Australia, Founder of RedBalloon, cofounder of Big Red Group
 
“Growth is top of mind for every company, but the path to achieving sustained growth can be elusive. In Growth IQ, Tiffani applies her deep expertise from working with the world's top brands to light a path to growth in this era of rapid digital transformation." —KEITH BLOCK, co-CEO, Salesforce

"Tiffani is a rockstar when it comes to growing the top line." —VERNE HARNISH, founder of Entrepreneurs’ Organization and author of Scaling Up

From the Publisher