Preorder a copy of Stall Points:[Amazon] [Barnes and Noble] [Yale University Press]

Stall Points explores the challenges to sustained revenue growth in large firms.  Over time, 90% of the Fortune 100 have experienced devastating growth stalls, yet almost the same percentage of those stalls were the result of preventable strategic or organizational factors. Stall Points challenges its readers to look for and act upon the “red flags” of looming revenue stalls within their organizations before they happen. Read excerpts from the book here.

Stall Points is written with four audiences in mind:

• general managers and executive management of companies,
• chief strategists,
• boards of directors and the governance community,
• and business students.

Stall Points is organized into three sections:

The Growth Experience of Large Firms: Relying on a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the growth experience of more than five hundred companies that have numbered among the Fortune 100 across the last fifty years, Matt Olson and Derek van Bever explore how common it is for companies to stall in their growth and what the short- and long- term consequences of those stalls are.  Conclusions include: it is common to stall, it is hard to see a stall coming, and it is extremely hard to recover from a stall.  In fact, companies that do not recover quickly face long odds at returning to a sustainable growth track.  Ever.

The Root Causes of Growth Stalls: Olson and van Bever complement the quantitative analysis with detailed case analysis of a subset of the Fortune 100 to determine why growth stalls occur.  Though they identified forty-two individual root causes in our analysis, the good news for executives is that these causes cluster: four categories account for just over half of all stalls cataloged.  Also, the vast majority of stalls are controllable—related to some strategy choice or organization design decision made by senior management.  This section also includes opportunities for readers to identify “red flags” at work in their own organizations.

Avoiding (or Recovering From) Growth Stalls: Olson and van Bever present a set of practices in use in leading corporations to articulate key assumptions related to stall risk factors with precision, to open them to the organization for scrutiny and to monitor them continuously to spot changes in the external environment that might render them obsolete.  This section also offers guidance to readers who fear that their organizations might be in the midst of growth stalls.