DOUBLE-DIGIT GROWTH How Great Companies Achieve It — No Matter What by Michael Treacy Portfolio Pages: 224; price: $22.05

IN India, there are 160 profit making companies that rang in annual gross profit growth of more than 10% over the last three years. That number isn't as pretty as it looks. The universe these companies are drawn from consists of nearly 5,000 companies listed on the BSE for which data is available from CMIE. That implies a lousy strike rate of less than 5%. Most of the better-known Tata group companies don't figure on the list.

Even the 10%-plus growth-slingers have to wage a never-ending karmic battle to revive dry profit streams. Most struggle to find the markers leading to oases of profit growth. Michael Treacy argues that this is true of many companies in America, Europe and Asia. They are all victims of no-growth paralysis - a systemic illness that is worsened by constant denial. According to him, the absence of double-digit growth (in gross profits, which he believes is the best measure of growth) is the business equivalent of suicide.

Too bad Treacy doesn't have enough case studies or data to back this somewhat extreme assertion. A lot of companies seem to get by fine with slow and steady growth year after year. In 1997, Procter & Gamble's shareholders actually shot down a proposal to super-charge growth, saying they had invested in a stable business, not a growth machine.

Never mind. Most shareholders would willingly take the risks attendant to fast growth. The importance of this book lies in the compelling model it offers for sustained growth.

But maybe your management team has it all figured out already. After all, your company did log double-digit growth last year. And the year before that. There isn't a practising manager's guide written for you.

Hold on. Why don't you check if your team can answer the following (perfectly reasonable) questions that tell you if the growth was the result of sheer luck or a well-thought out business strategy?

• How much growth did customer churn cost your business last year? If your company had retained its customer base as successfully as your biggest rival did, how much faster would your business have grown?
  
  
• How much of your company's marketshare gain was achieved by selling more to current customers?
  
  
• Has it been cheaper in your industry to grow marketshare organically, or to acquire competitors?
  
  
• If your company had been positioned only in the fastest-growing segments of your market, how much faster would it have grown?
  
  
• What have been the three fastest-growing markets adjacent to your market, where the company's key capabilities could have been used? How much growth did your enterprise achieve in each of them?
  
  
• How much of your corporation's growth is due to new markets that it entered in the past five years?

Time out. How did your team do?

Double-Digit Growth urges companies to dramatically rethink the way they approach growth. Treacy proposes a portfolio management approach to licking the growth problem. Each company's portfolio should ideally be based on five growth disciplines that "...followed with care and dedication, can aid any enterprise - yours included - in achieving steady, double-digit growth year after year".

All five disciplines are the outcome of insights gained from a study of the growth habits of some 130 businesses. The first discipline focusses on improving customer-base retention. The second focusses on market share gain, while the third makes sure your company will show up where growth is going to happen. The fourth is all about penetrating adjacent markets where your core operating capabilities can give you a real advantage. It also forces you to think about building or acquiring additional capabilities to meet the competitive standards in such markets. And finally, the fifth discipline focusses on achieving growth by invading new lines of business.

Much like an investment portfolio, the five options have to be balanced, and rebalanced according to the demands of the market. And like an investment portfolio, at any point of time, your strategy is likely to be weighted heavily in favour of two or three disciplines.

This book offers a simple, yet powerful way of thinking about the growth process. But the real test of the model lies in its applicability across companies, across industries. Double-Digit Growth shows you how different companies are applying the disciplines to their business. The only difference is that they use different tactics and initiatives for creating growth. So while a Johnson & Johnson has used a combination of make and buy (acquire a company) to invade adjacent markets, Sony chose to blitz the video game market entirely under its own steam.

Your eagerness to race through the book to discover similar insights is sometimes met with high-resistance sentences. Just cut through the occasional clutter of Treacy's writing to appreciate the searing beauty of his simple model. The effort is worth it.

I was stimulated by Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan's THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. They tell you that you should not build organisations and institutions to last; you should instead build them to perform. We live in a world of rapidly changing ideas. Unless an organisation learns to embrace new realities fast, it can't last. Firms should also learn to discard what is not relevant. Divergent thinking fosters dynamism. Adaptive, divergent-thinking environments celebrate change and they flourish. My reading varies a bit. The other books I am going through are Ignited Minds by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Sons of Fortune by Jeffrey Archer.

Author and well-known media critic Ken Auletta frames his concerns about the state of modern American journalism, particularly the uneasy wedding of business interests and public service, with profiles of the likes of Rupert Murdoch. Starting with an exploration of the autocratic management style of Howell Raines, former executive editor at The New York Times, a style that contributed to the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, Auletta explores why one of America's most important industries is also among its most troubled.

THE trouble with a visual history of this kind, or with any history for that matter, is the selection. It is doubtful whether photo editor Prashant Panjiar would get very many to applaud his choice of 72 pictures that define the country. INDIA: The Definitive Images (1858 to the Present)* is mostly a reassuring collection. There is so much of the happily familiar that they balance the shock of finding a Salman Khan-Madhuri Dixit publicity still or a regulation soldiers-at-the-front shot replete with tricolour and guns (Kargil War, 1999).

If Panjiar's reconstructed image of the military triumph in Kargil and the final picture of a giant national flag in an extraordinary swirl appear to echo the current India Shining campaign that the Bharatiya Janata Party has just unleashed, there is also a record of Gujarat in its darkest moments. There is the firmly etched image of a terrorised Naseeruddin, pleading for his life during the carnage of 2000 along with the equally familiar blazing train at Godhra.

Definitive images can be construed in many ways - in defining the person, the event or the epoch. Not many photos can combine all three qualities and hope to become the iconic images of a period. There are, of course, the exceptions: Bourke-White's study of Mahatma Gandhi scanning some papers with a large spinning wheel in the foreground, Cartier-Bresson's evocative shot of the crowds at Gandhi's funeral. Between the predictable picture of the child victim of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the unremarkable photo that became the jacket of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things are some gems from the past, all of them in black and white.

*Published by Penguin Books India and Dorling Kindersley (Pages 167; special price: Rs 1,250).

ALISSA Quart believes that the "the personae, self-images, ambitions and values of young people in the United States have been seriously distorted by the commercial frenzy surrounding them". So in BRANDED - The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (published by Arrow), a somewhat high-pitched treatise about the over-commercialisation of adolescence, the author highlights some alarming facts and trends:

• Thirty-one million teens now spend more than $153 billion on leisure expenses - clothing, CDs, and make-up - a year.
  
  
• Fifty-five per cent of American high-school seniors work more than three hours a day to earn the money to pay for all this stuff.
  

Quart's rant against corporations includes the entire spectrum of social ills that afflict the cosmetic-coated, well-clad young victims of 'affluenza', including brand name education. The last is a revelation. It turns out that American kids are under as much pressure as their Indian variants to do well academically. Ambitious kids and their parents ought to read the chapter Logo U, if not the entire book.