Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-Digit Growth

Companies that purposefully set out to excel are remarkably few and far between.

The number of those who have a strong, well-thought out strategy for success are even fewer.

Based on five years of research and field-testing, Breakout Strategy gives you a "fast track" strategic vision that can push your company to incredible new rates of growth and expansion. Strategy and leadership experts Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey, and Thomas Lawton show how to craft a strategy that fits your business, whether you're a small start-up or an established national or international company. They also give you the tools to adapt that strategy as you grow and expand. Their system features five key initiatives:

• Create a workable vision by understanding the needs and aspirations of a company
• Face customers with a value proposition that covers all the important bases
• Align what a business does with what the customer truly desires
• Balance the people and process sides of business to deliver on promises
• Liberate the energies of any strategy's toughest critic-those who work within the business

Breakout Strategy puts these initiatives in context by examining how diverse companies achieved breakout growth, including jetBlue, Harley Davidson, and Starbucks. It also sheds light on how a poor strategy can topple a once-successful company off the pedestal of market dominance, such as Krispy Kreme's overly ambitious expansion strategy that stretched the company and the brand too thin.

With the systematic approach in Breakout Strategy, you'll be able to travel the fast track to market triumph, leaving your competitors struggling to catch up.

Sydney Finkelstein is the author of Why Smart Executives Fail, and professor of strategy and leadership at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Finkelstein holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Columbia University. He has worked with major global companies including Boeing, Deutsche Bank, and GE.

Charles Harvey is professor of business history and management, and dean of Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Harvey holds a BSc and PhD from the University of Bristol. He has worked with companies such as JP Morgan, Bombardier Transportation, and J Sainsbury.

Thomas Lawton is associate professor of strategic management at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. Lawton holds degrees from University College Cork and the London School of Economics and a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence. He has worked with IATA, IBM, and JP Morgan, among others.