Steve McKee writes from personal experience about being stuck. After 10 years in the advertising industry and as the co-founder of a leading regional firm, he had just collected an award for being one of the fastest-growing private businesses in the United States. It should have been a crowning achievement but McKee was uneasy. Back at the office, sales were down, staff were leaving and the company was failing to garner interest in its product. The firm was just spinning its wheels and nobody knew why.
So McKee and his colleagues turned to market research, zeroing in on struggling but once rapidly growing companies to try to understand why other former leading corporate lights had dimmed. The results are detailed in McKee's book, When Growth Stalls - How it Happens, Why You're Stuck and What to do About it.
One of the big things the author learned was that his company was normal. Irrespective of how great a firm's products, management and approach are, stalled growth is inevitable in every industry. Size doesn't matter and no company is safe. Market leaders had a better chance of maintaining growth but when the 'market tectonics' shift, every company is at risk.
The upheaval can come in several forms, whether it's an economic downturn, aggressive competition or changing industry dynamics. These external factors are the business equivalent of the Rumsfeldian known unknowns and survival is determined not so much by the degree of the hit but by the quality of the response.
Just ask Kodak. The rapid switch to digital photography caught the multinational napping, but in four years the company that had built a business out of film was selling digital cameras, digital photo frames and inkjet printers.
While outside forces demand attention, management will also inevitably have to focus on the internal issues inhibiting progress. Stalled growth also has a habit of revealing internal rifts, from personal distrust to strategic doubts, and, according to McKee, 'a lack of consensus is the number one internal problem' for stuck firms.