Edward Hess

Simply put, most entrepreneurial start-ups fail. Those fortunate enough to succeed then face a second, major challenge: how to grow. This book focuses on the key questions an entrepreneur must answer in order to grow a business. Based on extensive research of more than fifty successful growth companies, Grow to Greatness discusses the top ten growth challenges and how to overcome them. Author Edward D. Hess dispels the myth that businesses must grow or die. Growth can create value. But, too much growth too fast outstrips effective processes, controls, or management capacity. Viewing growth as "recurring change," Grow to Greatness lays out a framework for how to approach business development—and how to manage its risks and pace. The book then takes readers through chapters that explore whether the time is right to grow, how to do it, and how to manage the vital reality that growth requires the right leadership, culture, and people. Uniquely, this book aims to prepare readers for the day-to-day reality of growth, offering up the lived experiences of eleven entrepreneurs. Six workshops to assess where readers stand now and a suite of templates that will prove to be useful over time help bring the book's teachings to life. After reading this book, entrepreneurs will have a real understanding of their readiness to grow and place in the growth cycle, as well as a concrete action plan for where to take their businesses next. Many books address how to start a business, but this is a unique, go-to resource for readers who want to learn how to thrive beyond the start-up phase.

Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Businesses

Grow to Greatness

Growing an Entrepreneurial Business: Concepts and Cases is a textbook designed for courses that focus on managing small to medium sized enterprises. It focuses on the major management challenges that successful start-ups encounter when leaders decide to grow and scale their businesses. The book is divided into two partstext and casesto provide professors with maximum flexibility in organizing their courses. The thirty-five cases can be used in conjunction with the text, or independently. Twelve cases are written as narratives with multiple teaching points, but without a focus on a particular business decision; the remaining twenty-three cases were written around specific conundrums related to strategy, operations, finance, marketing, leadership, culture, human resources, organizational design, business model, and growth. Discussion questions are provided for each case. The text portion of the book discusses key issues derived from the author's research and consulting, and is meant to complement the case method of teaching, raising issues for conversation. In addition to the real-world knowledge that students will derive from the cases, readers will take away research-based templates and models that they can use in developing or consulting with small businesses.

Concepts & Cases

Growing an Entrepreneurial Business

Jeanne Liedtka

Organic business growth is governed by its own natural laws—underlying truths that set the stage for growth and innovation, much in the way that Einstein's law of relativity accounts for the movement of objects in the space-time continuum. The most fundamental law is that uncertainty is the only certainty. Dominating forces are ambiguity and change; the processes at work involve exploration, invention, and experimentation. Unfortunately, these truths run counter to the principles of stability, predictability, and linearity that have long informed the design of our firms. The Physics of Business Growth helps readers understand how to create growth in today's business environment, providing them a roadmap and a set of practical tools to navigate its challenges. The book lays out a three step formula that will prove invaluable to professionals who have the opportunity to influence growth now, as well as to tomorrow's growth leaders, guiding them in (1) creating the right employee and organizational mindsets to enable growth (2) building an internal corporate growth system, and (3) putting in place processes that result in identifying opportunities, launching growth experiments, and managing a growth portfolio.

Mindsets, System, and Processes

The Physics of Business Growth

Growing an Entrepreneurial Business: Concepts and Cases is a textbook designed for courses that focus on managing small to medium sized enterprises. It focuses on the major management challenges that successful start-ups encounter when leaders decide to grow and scale their businesses. The book is divided into two parts—text and cases—to provide professors with maximum flexibility in organizing their courses. The thirty-five cases can be used in conjunction with the text, or independently. Twelve cases are written as narratives with multiple teaching points, but without a focus on a particular business decision; the remaining twenty-three cases were written around specific conundrums related to strategy, operations, finance, marketing, leadership, culture, human resources, organizational design, business model, and growth. Discussion questions are provided for each case. The text portion of the book discusses key issues derived from the author's research and consulting, and is meant to complement the case method of teaching, raising issues for conversation. In addition to the real-world knowledge that students will derive from the cases, readers will take away research-based templates and models that they can use in developing or consulting with small businesses.

Edward Hess

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