Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There

Recently, some bestselling management books have focused on providing a recipe for greatness, while others have sought to unlock the secrets of long-term success. But a detailed analysis at the intersection of the two, one that explains how some companies manage to achieve repeated peaks of business performance, has been missing--until now.

Accenture’s Paul Nunes and Tim Breene have found that what matters is not just climbing your current S-curve, which is what you do to reach the top of a single successful business. Instead, they emphasize the equal importance of the moves you must make on the way to your next business; that is, making the jump to your future S-curve.

Jumping the S-Curve reveals crucial insights for making such transitions, including:

• Why traditional strategic planning won't allow you to find the "big-enough" market insights that are critical to superior performance
• Why your top team must be refreshed before performance starts to wane
• Why you need much more talent than you think, especially "serious talent" that will find you worthy of their time

Filled with original practical advice, Jumping the S-Curve demystifies how companies can thrive with one successful business after another, through both good times and bad.

Paul Nunes is the Executive Director of Research and an executive research fellow in the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business. He is the coauthor the award-winning book Mass Affluence and nearly 100 articles in academic and business publications. Tim Breene is Accenture's former Chief Strategy and Development Officer and current head of the company's digital marketing initiative. Breene and Nunes coauthored the Harvard Business Review article “The Chief Strategy Officer.”