Here is a summary of the concluding volume in Chris Zook's trilogy on the business core. The previous two books focused on supporting, exploiting and expanding your core business, whereas this book shows you what to do when your position in the marketplace is under threat. Zook points out the dangers of defending your core until your company dies, or of jumping to the next new thing and getting it wrong. He explains how to find hidden assets, how to structure the change process with the "focus-expand-redefine cycle" and why your customer base is so important. He provides questions to ask, and lists, charts and graphs to use in working things through.

What do most companies do when their formula for success has stalled? Many leap into new markets or consider risky mergers. But rarely do such moves pay off. Instead, we find that companies choosing instead to mine their hidden assets - assets they already possess but have failed to tap for maximum growth potential - can go from unsustainable to unstoppable growth.

"How can companies find sources of new, profitable growth? Our analysis indicates that most new growth will come from pushing the boundaries of a strong core business into 'adjacent' territory. This is different from the past, when companies typically sought growth from either expanding their core businesses or improving their weaker businesses or from diversifying and pursuing hot markets.

When we examined the growth records of several hundred companies, six basic types of "adjacency moves" emerged."

This article is a follow-up to "The Facts About Growth," which explored the findings of an extensive study by Bain & Company of the factors leading to consistent company value creation. While the early part of this article is repetitive of the earlier article, the latter part offers some good new insight.

Only a small minority of companies succeed in creating shareholder value over long periods of time, even when they manage to grow revenues. Many companies enjoy temporary spurts of growth, only to see their gains erode under the onslaught of competitors. And even those who achieve sustained revenue gains are often surprised to find no corresponding gain in shareholder value. Yet a handful of companies do succeed in growing revenues, net income, and most importantly, shareholder value for extended periods. Our research has shown that these few companies demonstrate four common characteristics:
1. An ability to properly define and remain focused on their business' "profitable core";
2. A relentless pursuit of business adjacencies that leverage and strengthen the profitable core;
3. The ability to anticipate and quickly react to major industry structural changes; and
4. Processes that eliminate or circumvent the inherent organizational inhibitors to growth.

This Thought Piece, the first in the series, is intended to provide a factual foundation for the discussions on growth and value creation that follow, and to debunk the many myths and misconceptions about how companies grow and create value.

All customers are not created equal. The companies that excel, both in the short and long term, are those that are not only thoughtful about where they acquire customers, but also learn to quickly segment the profitable, loyal ones from the fool's gold of bargain hunters.

challenges each player to remove as many blocks as possible from a cross-hatched tower of wooden beams and to use them to build additional stories, all without causing the tower to crash.Although the name connotes "building," the game is about both disassembly and reassembly, and as such forms a fitting analogy for the way eCommerce is plucking out key blocks or leveling and rebuilding towers in virtually every business. The question of the hour: will such activity forever change the skyline of industry? The answer: absolutely.