Chris Zook

The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment—find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that 90% of the challenges to growth are internal: increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, and proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. More crucial is their finding that companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. In addition, if not managed properly, these crises can stifle even the healthiest company’s ability to grow further—and actively lead it into decline.

The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a “founder’s mentality”—an insurgent’s clear mission and purpose, an unambiguous owner mindset, and a relentless obsession with the front line (behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder)—to restore the speed, focus, and connection to customers, all of which are lost as companies grow. Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than 40 countries, any leaders—not only founders—can use the Founder’s Mentality to overcome these predictable challenges and set their companies back on a path of sustainable growth. This book shows how to empower leaders everywhere to control the destiny of their companies.

Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change

Is radical reinvention the key to winning in today’s fast-paced world? Not judging by the results of some of the world’s best-performing companies.

In Repeatability, Chris Zook and James Allen—leaders of Bain & Company’s influential Strategy practice—warn that complexity is a silent killer of profitable growth. Successful companies endure by maintaining simplicity at their core. They don’t stray from, or regularly discard, their business model in pursuit of radical renovation. Instead, they build a “repeatable business model” that produces continuous improvement and allows them to rapidly adapt to change without succumbing to complexity.

Based on a multiyear study of more than two hundred companies, the book stresses the value of repeatability in business, showing how the “big idea” today is really made up of a series of successful smaller ideas driven by a simple and repeatable business model. Zook and Allen show how some of the world’s best-known firms combine a core differentiation model with speed, adaptability, and simplicity to land them at the top for long periods of time. These firms include: Apple, Danaher, DaVita, IKEA, Nike, Olam, Tetra Pak, Vanguard, and others.

Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times
When Profit from the Core was published in 2001, it became an international bestseller, helping hundreds of companies find their way back to profitable growth after the bursting of the Internet bubble. The 2007 global financial meltdown reaffirmed the perils of pursuing heady growth through untested strategies, as firms in industries from finance to retailing to automobiles strayed too far from their core businesses and suffered the consequences.

In this updated edition of Profit from the Core, authors Chris Zook and James Allen show that a renewed focus on the core is more critical than ever as firms seek to rebuild their competitive advantage coming out of the downturn—and that a strong core will be the foundation for successful expansion as the economy recovers.

Based on more than ten years of Bain & Company research and analysis and fresh examples from firms responding to the current downturn, the book outlines what today’s executives and managers need to do now to revitalize their core, identify the next wave of profitable growth, and build on it successfully.

Zook and Allen explain how companies can:

• Develop a strong, well-defined core and use it to establish a leadership position
• Follow the golden rule of strategy: discourage competitors from investing in your core
• Assess whether your core is operating at its full potential
• Uncover hidden assets in your core that provide the seeds for new growth
• Find a repeatable formula to apply core business strengths in adjacent markets

Building on powerful and proven ideas to meet today’s formidable business challenges, Profit from the Core is the back-to-basics strategy field guide no manager should be without.

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Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth
Over the next decade, two out of every three companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition and facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today.

Unstoppable shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the “hidden assets” that can be the basis for tomorrow′s growth.

Building on the author′s previous books, Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, this book shows how any company in crisis can transform itself to become truly unstoppable.

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Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots

All companies must grow to survive—but only one in five growth initiatives succeeds. In Profit from the Core, strategy expert Chris Zook revealed how to grow profitably by focusing on and achieving full potential in the core business. But what happens when your core business provides insufficient new growth, or even hits the wall?

In Beyond the Core, Zook outlines an expansion strategy based on putting together combinations of adjacency moves into areas away from, but related to, the core business, such as new product lines or new channels of distribution. These sequences of moves carry less risk than diversification, yet they can create enormous competitive advantage, because they stem directly from what the company already knows and does best.

Based on extensive research on the growth patterns of thousands of companies worldwide, including CEO interviews with twenty-five top performers in adjacency growth, Beyond the Core