Foreword

Organic growth is management’s most critical job. For those running well-established businesses and brands, you should look first and foremost to the businesses that you are already in and the brands you already own to get as much growth from those as you can. This organic growth is the highest return on investment available to any company.

Most of us have already cost-cut to maximize the bottom line. There is no way to achieve growth breakthroughs by squeezing out more efficiency. The effort to grow through acquisition has proven to be too difficult, expensive, and risky for most people. Acquisitions require you to manage the unfamiliar, whether it’s the change management involved with integration or mastering new categories and businesses. Bigger is not better; better is better!

So the prudent alternative is to do more to mine the growth of the businesses you currently manage. It is possible to defy the perceived boundaries and limitations of your current businesses and break through to new levels of growth.

The way ahead is through new insights into the needs of consumers and channel customers, which in turn lead to innovations. If you enhance benefits rather than merely improving products, your brands and solutions become more significant in the lives of consumers and in the business plans of your customers and partners. Achieving these breakthroughs requires new ways of working and leveraging your knowledge, relationships, and people assets. Today, the successful business leader must make these breakthroughs possible through purposeful changes in the organizational culture.

This level of change includes a radical transformation of what is known as “marketing.” Marketing must move to a holistic, system-wide approach that begins with insights and that drives rapidly and relentlessly to the delivery of a better experience to consumers and channel customers in the marketplace. This is a marketing discipline built on process, creativity, measurement, and collaboration.

The principles and practices espoused in this book will help you create the right mind-set for change. All of us need to rethink how we deliver value to our shareholders, customer channels, and consumers while transforming our organizations to be attractive to the best talent, both within and with outside partners. This book will help you steer your organization through an ever more challenging business environment—to thrive, not just survive.

Tom Falk

CEO, Kimberly-Clark Corporation