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Book Description

ISBN-0131860828

The iPod is a harbinger of a revolution in product design: innovation that targets customer emotion, self-image, and fantasy, not just product function.

Read the hidden stories behind BodyMedia’s SenseWear body monitor, Herman Miller’s Mirra Chair, Swiffer’s mops, OXO’s potato peelers, Adidas’ intelligent shoes, the new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and many other winning innovations.

Meet the innovators, learning how they inspire and motivate their people, as they shepherd their visions through corporate bureaucracy to profitable reality.

The authors deconstruct the entire process of design innovation, showing how it really works, and how today’s smartest companies are innovating more effectively than ever before.

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Book Description

ISBN-0471468932

Stretch! shows business leaders how to achieve sustained business growth even in the toughest economic times. A.T. Kearney surveyed some 29,000 global companies over fourteen years and studied more than eighty companies in depth, in order to determine how the best companies continue to grow in good times and bad.

Based on this extensive research and on the best practices of the most successful companies, this book presents a practical, step-by-step plan for positive organic growth.

Stretch! offers a four-stage framework for growth, then outlines the precise steps for implementing each stage. Contrary to accepted wisdom, research shows that growth has little or nothing to do with industry maturity, geography, or business cycles.

Strong and successful growth is possible in any industry, in any region, at any time–growth isn’t dependent on outside factors, but on the internal actions a company takes.

The book begins by describing the current predicament for companies that find their growth has flatlined, then uses intriguing case studies to illustrate the four stages of growth:

• Operations: dramatically improve internal processes such as product development, sourcing, quality, delivery, customer service, sales, and pricing
• Organization: find the organizational structure that best suits the company, determine opportunities for value chain reconfiguration, evaluate and adjust compensation, reward, and incentive programs
• Strategy: reinvent the core strategy, stretch brands, and extend lines, focusing on the value proposition offered to the customer
• Stretch: expand the business frontier, venture into new territory, break down barriers to create new products and reach new customers, markets, and geographic regions

Truly great companies find ways to grow no matter the current state of the economy or the business climate. They focus on innovation and calculated risk, continuously improving products and jumping into new opportunities to secure future sales.

They understand that growth should be accomplished through a combination of mergers and acquisitions, product innovation, organizational efficiency, and new markets.