Is your company bursting at the seams? Playing catch-up to your competitors? Trapped by “rear-view mirror” management?Most businesses—whether large or small, public or private, profit or non-profit—have one thing in common: they want to grow. How can business leaders tap into the entrepreneurial spirit that launched the enterprise, and channel it into sustainable, breakthrough growth?In The Next Level, James Wood draws on seven years of research and consulting with hundreds of companies, under the auspices of Inc. magazine and the Inc. Growth Strategy Consulting Group—the preeminent sources of information for growing companies—to present a powerful approach for business owners, managers, directors, and advisers to analyze their organization's growth potential, identify the obstacles to future growth, and implement the critical priorities and actions to ensure long-term success.Through in-depth examples of such unusual and diverse companies as Group Publishing of Loveland, Colorado; Main Street Muffins of Akron, Ohio; and Discovery Toys of Livermore, California, Wood demonstrates that every organization reaches critical transition points that require fundamental changes, in systems and processes, capabilities and resources, philosophies and goals, and even management structures and leadership. Those who are willing to look forward to new challenges—not backward to past successes—are poised to take a leadership position in the marketplace. The Next Level shows managers how to make these creative and strategic leaps. Wood presents a wide variety of strategic and tactical tools, including the Growth Strategy Analysis, a powerful, field-tested diagnostic assessment that allows you to identify your organization's relative strengths and weaknesses and determine whether you're “behind the pack,” “getting by,” or “one step ahead,” along five key variables—market intelligence, strategic leadership, clarity of purpose, planning, and internal infrastructure—and offers a wealth of practical guidance for mastering these critical elements.Written in the lively, hands-on, and incisive style that readers of Inc. have come to expect, The Next Level reminds readers that they control the destiny of their organizations, by virtue of the quality of decisions they make about their companies' futures. The Next Level will help you make those crucial decisions that lead to sustained and profitable growth.
As most CEOs eventually discover, the process of maintaining long-term corporate growth may be the most difficult professional task they ever face--and one that is far more complicated than almost any other aspect of running their businesses. After studying hundreds of real-life efforts of this type over much of the past decade as director of Inc. magazine's Business Resources Growth Strategy Consulting Group, James B. Wood has developed a systematic approach to implementing successful growth in companies of all types--large or small, public or private, for-profit or non-profit. In The Next Level: Essential Strategies for Achieving Breakthrough Growth, written with Larry Rothstein, Wood reviews the common stages of corporate growth, and presents an interactive Growth Strategy Analysis so readers can assess their companies' own strengths and weaknesses. He then details his five so-called critical Growth Drivers (market intelligence, strategic leadership, clarity of purpose, strategic planning, and internal infrastructure) that just about any company can follow. --Howard Rothman
