Chapter One: High Performance: The Business of Jumping S-Curves: To climb an S-curve, a business must have the right foundation in place: the building blocks of high performance. Fail to create these bulwarks of success, and your performance will be on shaky ground. Develop them properly and you’ll have the solid base you need to succeed with a new business.
Chapter Two: A Big Enough Market Insight: To climb the financial S-curve and outperform competitors, a company can’t waste time and money on small or uncertain market opportunities. Instead, it must identify a “big enough market insight”—that is, a substantial market change on the horizon that heralds the chance to build a major business for the company that identifies and seizes the opportunity.
Chapter Three: Threshold Competence Before Scaling: High performers are rarely first to market. They build essential capabilities before scaling their operations and plan for success far upstream, often focusing on details such as production and channel strategy early on. The key: they understand exactly how they must be distinctive in order to create the value the market demands.
Chapter Four: Worthy of Serious Talent: High performers attract and keep the “serious talent” they need to create a successful business. These companies instill a mindset of relentless improvement throughout their workforce and gain the confidence of critical employees, whether they are far-sighted senior executives, never-say-die salespeople, or engineers with a flair for creative genius.
Chapter Five: Hidden S-Curves: To gauge how much time is left on the clock of a currently successful business, a company should look for signs of trouble in each of the building blocks it used to climb the S-curve.
Chapter Six: Edge-Centric Strategy: High performers have two processes for making strategy: one to drive the core business and the other to stay on top of market evolution.
Chapter Seven: Top Teams that Change Early: High performers realize that succession planning is not about replacing executives in an emergency. Top management teams need to evolve when the distinctiveness of the company’s capabilities begins to wane—not when business performance starts to plateau. High performance businesses reconstitute executive teams early and often, and groom new executive talent, to ensure that they have the right balance of managerial and entrepreneurial skill needed to the jump to the next S-curve.
Chapter Eight: Hothouse of Talent: Jumping an S-curve requires an excess of talent—something that goes against the grain of companies that are trying to be efficient keeping head-count lean while a business grows. High performers plant and nurture the seeds of talent that let them successfully jump to the next business S-curve.
Chapter Nine: Sharp Curves Ahead: A variety of major developments on the horizon—from cloud computing to digital marketing to business analytics—promise to disrupt businesses in the coming decade, challenging them yet again to scale and jump the S-curve of high performance. To jump to the next S-curve successfully, companies must know the likely future shape of their current one.