Let’s face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There’s an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we’ll call them simply “products” for simplicity’s sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy … Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don’t focus on their weaknesses. That’s understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.

It's a 100-segment world. How can you stay a step ahead?

You're insured and hedged against many risks-but not the greatest ones, the strategic risks that can disrupt or even destroy your business. Learn to anticipate and manage these threats systematically and, in the process, turn some of them into growth opportunities.

Brands have become increasingly fragile and difficult to sustain. Failure to invest in the right mix of activities at the right time risks eroding the brand. On the other hand, those companies that anticipate and avoid the common investment traps can reap superior growth in brand value over a long period of time.

Companies face numerous types of risk, and they hedge or insure against them in a variety of ways. However, the largest potential risk to a corporation--strategic risk--must be borne directly by managers and shareholders. They face the consequences if a company's shareholder value collapses, stagnates, or becomes dwarfed by a competitor's. Pattern thinking can help managers both foresee risk and identify new profit opportunities that will lead to sustained, above-average value growth. Mercer Management Consulting research has described thirty patterns that, over the past two decades, have drastically shifted profit and power in numerous industries; we expect that number to increase as new patterns are discerned. The ability to identify strategic patterns helps managers see beneath the surface chaos of today's business environment to the underlying drivers of customer and economic behavior. It also provides a shortcut to managers who, in a world where the useful life of business designs is growing ever shorter, must rapidly assess options and place bets on future moves.

Beyond earthquakes and currency fluctuations, there's a broad array of strategic risks poised to disrupt or even destroy any business. But embracing risk is also part of the growth equation. Is your business prepared? And what are the risks you should be taking but aren't?

Catching the right moment to take action when successful business models begin to wane requires skilled detection work and the courage to face reality. In this article on value migration -- the process by which changing markets and new competitors threaten a company's equilibrium -- a system of early-warning diagnostics is recommended.

It's every company's goal -- but it's one that few manage to achieve. Here are strategies and tactics to make your company grow again, drawn from in-depth research on companies that have been registering double-digit growth for years. Tired of cutting costs and downsizing dreams? This is your wake-up call.

"The pressure is on for strategic sales management. We attempt to alleviate this pressure for all arenas by explaining first of all that strategic sales management works: we present data which reveal that corporate financial performance depends on a well-run sales force. We next turn to the importance of customer selection, customer focus and customer retention. We explain the importance of designing a sales force architecture around a carefully defined sales task. Finally, we delineate a three-part sales management system that will help you integrate these activities to make strategic sales management the cornerstone of an organization dedicated to dealing with today's customers in today's competitive world."