By examining the stories of companies like LoJack, MySpace and Groupon, an expert in Strategic Management describes how organizations can sustain high-growth through a repeatable process for innovation without succumbing to the growth hump. 30,000 first printing.

Why do most growth companies stop growing? And what can their leaders do to overcome the barriers to growth? The Curve Ahead tackles these questions, filling a void in the literature on innovation and growth strategy that has focused on either start-ups or large public companies. Growth companies are different. Their challenge is to transition from entrepreneurial focus to a repeatable process for innovation and sustained growth - and the stakes are high. The Curve Ahead utilizes the power of storytelling to teach growth company leaders how to sustain long-term growth. Using the example of a "gazelle," a high-growth company that is increasing revenue by at least 20% annually for four years or more, this book explores the struggles faced during business growth - something that plagues many businesses. These mid-size companies, typically with annual revenues of $10 million to $100 million, are the engines of economic growth and wealth creation. Tragically, most fall behind the curve before they reach their potential and are sold by investors too ready to throw in the towel. This book doesn't just lay out a fresh approach to innovation and growth strategy. It also helps professionals and business leaders avoid common pitfalls by illustrating the various ways in which growth companies get stuck and flame out. Author Dave Power then tells leaders how to get un-stuck. In addition to a myriad of real-world stories and case studies, each chapter of The Curve Ahead begins with the story of a fictional company called NaviMark. Navimark is emblematic of many growth companies—it faces the same business problems, personal challenges and strategic dilemmas encountered by Power in his 25 years managing, investing in and advising growth companies. Following Navimark throughout the book allows Power to provide a highly complex model of typical struggles and scenarios faced by growth companies and deliver that story to his readers in an extremely edifying, play-by-play manner. The strategy allows readers to follow along—observing, in real time, the way that Navimark evolves, and responds (correctly or incorrectly) to external obstacles and demands. This practical and fast-paced book uses realistic characters, dialogue, and business settings to: • Help readers anticipate the predictable challenges of business model maturity. • Demonstrate proven tools and approaches for overcoming the barriers to growth. • Translate abstract concepts about innovation into actionable programs that can become a part of the rhythm of the business. This book will help thousands of midsized companies overcome the growth hump by providing the tools necessary to not only succeed but thrive in the future. The Curve Ahead provides a roadmap for leaders who want to sustain growth over the long term. This roadmap is based on five premises: 1. Every business model matures, following the familiar S-Curve. 2. You can and must stretch the S-Curve, but that won't work forever. 3. To sustain growth you need to find the next S-Curve 4. Finding your next S-Curve, with some predictability, requires an innovation process, something every company should have in place. 5. Driving innovation while keeping the core business healthy is the responsibility of leaders.

A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities—developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain.

What can prosperity possibly mean in a world of environmental and social limits? The publication of Prosperity without Growth was a landmark in the sustainability debate. Tim Jackson’s piercing challenge to conventional economics openly questioned the most highly prized goal of politicians and economists alike: the continued pursuit of exponential economic growth. Its findings provoked controversy, inspired debate and led to a new wave of research building on its arguments and conclusions. This substantially revised and re-written edition updates those arguments and considerably expands upon them. Jackson demonstrates that building a ‘post-growth’ economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task. Starting from clear first principles, he sets out the dimensions of that task: the nature of enterprise; the quality of our working lives; the structure of investment; and the role of the money supply. He shows how the economy of tomorrow may be transformed in ways that protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality and deliver both ecological and financial stability. Seven years after it was first published, Prosperity without Growth is no longer a radical narrative whispered by a marginal fringe, but an essential vision of social progress in a post-crisis world. Fulfilling that vision is simply the most urgent task of our times.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike. That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design. Named after the now-iconic “doughnut” image that Raworth first drew to depict a sweet spot of human prosperity (an image that appealed to the Occupy Movement, the United Nations, eco-activists, and business leaders alike), Doughnut Economics offers a radically new compass for guiding global development, government policy, and corporate strategy, and sets new standards for what economic success looks like. Raworth handpicks the best emergent ideas—from ecological, behavioral, feminist, and institutional economics to complexity thinking and Earth-systems science—to address this question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow? Simple, playful, and eloquent, Doughnut Economics offers game-changing analysis and inspiration for a new generation of economic thinkers.