The stall points research traces its origins to the corporate planning team at Hewlett-Packard in the mid 1990s. George Bodway, then head of planning for HP, and his team had been charged by the HP leadership team with studying barriers growth for large corporations. The Corporate Executive Board was invited to join a host of research partners studying various aspects of the issue, with our role to explore how often and why large companies have stalled. In that initial effort we examined the growth patterns of every Fortune 50-sized company across a 40-year period, and we studied exhaustively 50 representative cases of stalled companies to underlying why they’d stalled. This, then, was the original stall points initiative, prepared at the direction of the HP working group and shared with that group, and after that, with member companies of the Corporate Executive Board’s membership for strategy and planning executives.

What has caused us to update and expand the initial analysis, and to share it with a broader audience, is our belief that the lessons we have learned about stall points in corporate growth are important for a broadening set of leadership teams to understand and act upon. Some very clear recent trends – an over-reliance on earnings growth over revenue growth for value creation, and a swelling in the ranks of large corporations entering a “danger zone” for stalls given their size – create urgency for these firms in the present hour, and in the years ahead.