Marketbusters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth

by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan

Book Overview

Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities YOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth--or don't. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive? In this...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591391237
• ISBN13: 9781591391234
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A Book of Business Ideas and Strategies

Market Busters, which purports to offer "40 strategic moves that drive exceptional business growth," follows through well on that promise and does exactly that. It's not a book of fluff or platitudes, and every single strategic move in the book is built upon a foundation of time-tested theories and actual, real-world examples. This isn't a motivational book that tells you "you can do it" but rather an extensive study into what has worked (and also what has NOT worked) written for educated people in straight-forward, albeit not "dumbed down" terms. Here's how the process works for these 40 moves and for this WHOLE book; in my humble opinion, it's a good process, and I learned a lot. It will suggest a business strategy as follows. I'll take one as an example. Move #11: Eliminate Complexity: "...opportunity for what we call radical surgery, a move to dramatically eliminate complexity. Radical surgery is made possible, ironically, by the very efforts of companies to be responsive and to invest in improving their offerings. [...]" Two examples are then provided, one of a stripped-down hotel experience and another of an overly-complicated oven. Finally, prospecting questions are provided for eliminating complexity or executing the strategy move first proposed. WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR: This book is for serious business people, and people who want to study business as a science and a strategy and not simply as an array of promises and platitudes. I think it is best for someone in a LARGER company or with ABOVE-AVERAGE resources, because a lot of the moves suggest using teams or collections of people, so it is most suitable for corporations and large entities, although for me, it was a pleasure brainstorming experience even as a small business. Overall, the book is great. It provides a strategic move, talks about it, gives examples, and then asks you prospecting questions or thinking questions to force you to think about the strategy as it applies to your own business. The examples are all real-world and don't always involve success (some show what caused failure). I'd recommend this not only to people already in business but also those planning new ventures.

Immediate tools for driving organic growth

There are a number of books on the market focused on innovation, and this one is by far the best. McGrath and MacMillan have built upon concepts introduced in The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and have yet again provided actionable strategies for driving extraordinary growth. MarketBusters provides a disciplined approach toward examining "profit drivers" within a company and developing straight forward strategies for redefining products, processes and business models. Through models and prospecting questions, the book provides a hands-on tool that can be put to use immediately in virtually any business. For example, identifying what you charge customers for and how you measure profitablity, and changing the game to match customer needs, is an example of a simple, but effective technique for redefining your offerings and developing a defensible competitive position. I have seen the results of using the concepts in MarketBusters. A must read!

Strategic thougths of international value

Better than "Ghostbusters!", this book is most valuable due to its sharp questions and pointed advice to chase away the ghost of slow growth. I'm professionally involved in Private Equity and Venture Capital investing in Germany and internationally. For an investor it is crucial to understand growth drivers and the future growth potential of portfolio companies. The 40 strategic moves and the framework for MarketBusters offer practical guidelines - far more helpful in the day to day business than for example the rather conceptional books of Clayton Christensen. I would highly recommend this book not only to top executives for structuring their companies' growth efforts, but also for investors as guidelines for due diligence questions and better comprehension of growth potentials. Clearly 5 Stars!

Market Busters

If business growth or commercial development is in your job description, then you will want to keep this book at hand. In the first place, it has been written for the practitioner (a point which is deeply appreciated by those of us who hate to wade through heavily footnoted academic works in order to ferret out what might be of practical use). In fact, it almost reminds me of a cookbook - a list of tested recipes you might use to prepare some business growth depending on what materials you have on hand. That is why I keep the book on my desk - it allows me to make a quick assessment of just what I am dealing with along with ways to go about it. The book does assume a certain familiarity with the activities/scenarios that surround growing a business. For a rookie, I'd recommend reading "The Entrepreneurial Mindset" first. Finally, there is a real nugget in this book, which, in my opinion, should not have been relegated to the second-to-the-last chapter. However, starting on page 181, there is a discussion on what it is really like to try to implement these market-busting moves inside a company. Having spent 17 years in industry, most of it in early stage development, I find the organizational difficulties of executing outside the normal parameters to be much harder than any technical or market challenge. This book is one of the few that even begins to address that difficulty and provides strategies to deal with it. This chapter proves that the authors know about the workings of large companies beyond the conceptual level. In summary, this is a readable, practical, useful, and insightful book - you will not get tired of it.

How to Achieve and Then Sustain Exceptional Business Growth

Ignore the glitzy title and concentrate on the solid material which is provided. As the subtitle of this volume correctly indicates, McGrath and MacMillan identify and then explain "40 strategic moves that drive exceptional business growth." Decision-makers in many organizations still do not understand that strategies resemble hammers in that they "drive" tactics which are comparable with nails. Of course, both strategies and tactics must be selected with meticulous care, then implemented effectively. The core of this book involves five strategies to create "marketbusters": Transform the customers' experience, transform your offerings, redefine profit drivers, exploit industry shifts, and consider entering (for you) new markets. No news there. The value of this book is derived from McGrath and MacMillan's explanations of (a) HOW to select the strategies which are most appropriate to your organization's current and imminent needs and (b) WHAT to do when coordinating those strategies with tactics (or "moves") during the implementation process. To assist that process, they provide "Preparing Yourself: Audit Your Strategy and Clarify Your Process," a self-dianostic which poses most (if not all) of the key questions to be answered and most (if not all) of the key issues to be addressed. Of special interest to me is the provision, also, of a set of "Action Steps" at the conclusion of each chapter. With regard to the "40 Moves," they are organized as follows, accompanied by specific examples: Numbers 1-5 which involve changing the consumption chain (pages 25-39), Numbers 6-12 which various companies have used to shift the attribute maps for their offerings and create marketbusters (pages 54-76, Numbers 13-20 which suggest potential alternatives to a current unit of business (pages 92-113), Numbers 21-32 which can help to structure (or restructure) consideration of possible industrywide shifts (pages 119-148), and Numbers 33-40 which can assist the formulation of a typology of potential opportunity types and an understanding of what achieving success with each may require (pages 156-179). McGrath and MacMillan then provide a "MarketBuster Case Study" of Royal Insurance Italy in which they demonstrate at least some of the potentialities of the cohesive and comprehensive process previously discussed, followed by an Appendix in which all 40 "Moves" are briefly but thoughtfully reiterated. I strongly recommend to those who read this book that they re-read the Appendix at least monthly so as to be prepared to recognize whichever new growth options and opportunities may emerge since first reading this book. When concluding this brief commentary, I presume to offer a few caveats. First, beware of what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton characterize as "The Knowing-Doing Gap" in the book which bears that title. More often than not, decision-makers fail to convert knowledge into action to achieve the desired results. In this context, I am reminded of Coac