The coauthor of the international bestseller Execution has created the how-to guide for solving today’s toughest business challenge: creating profitable growth that is organic, differentiated, and sustainable.

For many, growth is about “home runs”—the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don’t happen every day and frequently come in cycles.

Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena. A surer and more consistent path to profitable revenue growth is through “singles and doubles”—small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business model.

Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone’s business—not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company’s call center handling customer inquiries and complaints to the CEO.

In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, profitable growth. For more than twenty-five years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Easy read with great advice
Comment: Bought the book for a planning event for the company and most enjoy reading it. Really easy to read but packed with great insights and valuable lessons.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking
Comment: I found the book every interesting. Nothing ground breaking but Ram Charan says it like it is. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a quick read who wants to learn about business growth.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Charan does it again: ten ways to make more money
Comment: This excellent, short work is a classic in its genre. Author Ram Charan outlines in no-nonsense, albeit sometimes prolix, style the essentials that all managers need to know to make their businesses and their revenues grow. Charan offers 10 basic principles, explains each one clearly, and provides anecdotal examples. The author readily admits that the principles are mostly common sense, and even perhaps widely understood (in part, from his other popular works). However, he says that the problem for most businesses is not having the right ideas, but rather turning the ideas into action. We recommend this mainstay for any business manager's bookshelf. It will help you face the challenge of growth.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A real disappointment based on his past successes
Comment: I have really enjoyed Ram Charan's writing in the past. I have really enjoyed Ram Charan's writing in the past. He is generally simple, clear, but most important actionable. This book, however, was a real disappointment to me as it fails to deliver on it's promise: 10 tools to use on Monday morning. I guess Ram got stuck on simple and clear but the sad fact is that profitable growth is neither and this is where actionable is left in the cold.

One point was outstanding: look for singles and doubles (not out-of-the-park home runs) and build on those over time. But he could have said that in a journal article or a business magazine commentary and saved us all a lot of wasted time reading.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A few good ideas, but pretty wordy
Comment: I purchased this together with Ram's other highly-praised book, "What the CEO Wants You to Know." I'd give the CEO book a D review and this a C review because this at least gave me a few new ideas. Charan's style of using stories to reiterate his points started to quickly annoy me, but I did get a few tips. As an operations person, I thought it had a pretty big marketing focus, but still reinforced a few good ideas such as the need to ensure you're not always just looking for ways to cut costs, but grow revenue with the same amount of costs.

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