Editorial Review:
The vast majority of small businesses stay small—and not by choice. Only the most savvy and persistent—a tiny one tenth of one percent—break through to annual sales above $250 million. In The Breakthrough Company, Keith McFarland pinpoints how everyday companies become extraordinary, showing that luck is a negligible factor. Rather, breakthrough success turns out to be associated with a clearly identifiable set of strategies and skills that anyone in any business can emulate—from small startup to industry leader.
Encouraged by experts such as business legend Peter Drucker and Good to Great author Jim Collins to identify the drivers that enable a company to push past the entrepreneurial phase, McFarland spent five years building and analyzing the world’s largest growth-company performance database and interviewing more than 1,500 growth-company executives on four continents. His goal was simple: to identify the secrets of breakthrough.
The Breakthrough Company is the result. Winnowing a study pool of more than 7,000 companies down to nine that have made the transition to major-player status, McFarland highlights real-world tools and myth-busting insights that can be used by anyone wanting his or her business to join this exclusive circle. Among the book’s takeaways:
• Common wisdom holds that the founders and core entrepreneurial leaders of a company must step aside for the business to reach the next level. Not true—as long as founders “crown the company” instead of themselves.
• It’s not reckless to make ever-escalating bets on your company’s future, even going nose to nose with competitors many times your size. In fact, it turns out that the only safety comes in constantly upping the ante in exactly this way.
• A Business Bermuda Triangle does exist, gobbling up companies on the verge of breakthrough. Presented here are three ways to navigate this potentially deadly hazard successfully.
• However good you are—or think you are—you can’t do it alone. Learn how to surround your company with networks of outside resources, aka “scaffolding,” and how to enlist the aid of “insultants”—people who are willing to question a firm’s existing assumptions and ways of doing business.
With powerful and specific action steps concluding each chapter—and invaluable advice on virtually every page from business leaders who’ve taken their companies to extraordinary levels of growth and profitability—The Breakthrough Company is one of the most provocative, inspiring, and instructive business books you’ll ever read.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
More Useful than "Good to Great" by Colins  2008-08-31
While Collin's "Good to Great" is a great book "The Breakthrough Company" is much better and more practical for most business people. It deals with the practical success criteria for "start-up" and small to medium firms. I have read it twice and already given away about a dozen copies.
How to Grow and Grow and Grow 2008-08-25
While my own book focuses on dramatically increasing your visibility, Keith's book targets dramatically increasing that... and everything else! Don't stay small when you don't have to: let the wisdom within Keith's pages show you how to grow and grow and grow.
The Good to Great book for small businesses 2008-08-12
Breakthrough Companies is a great book that is the "Good to Great" book for small businesses.
It talks about how small businesses became breakthrough companies by taking actions.
I highly recommend this book
Here are the major things Keith talks about in his book
Crowning the company
Build something bigger than themselves. A Breakthrough company worries first about the company before any one person.
They use the following table to show the differences
Upping the Ante
Breakthrough companies are willing to place big bets on investments that can over time tip the odds in a company's favor.
Like poker they need to focus on
(i) Understanding the game
(ii) Calculating the odds
(iii) Understanding his competitors
(iv) Understanding himself and his company
Building Company Character
Great quotes used in the book
"A man's character is his fate" - Heraclitus
" People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A company's view of people is an unmistakable reflection of its organization character. If it sees people as selfish, lazy, and unmotivated - that's the kind of people it will attract. If it believes in the potential of people to do great things, and has competent leadership, its people will rise to the occasion.
Breakthrough companies pride themselves on finding ways to cut costs in areas that don't matter much, but generously ladle resources into areas they know will give them an edge.
Breakthrough companies are built on a bedrock of company character.
Values refer to what people in a company purport to believe, while character refers to how people in an organization really operate
All breakthrough companies followed the following characteristics
(i) Give folks a fair deal
(ii) Believe in people
(iii) Be strategic miser
(iv) Make your word count
Navigating the business Bermuda triangle
Small companies, by virtue of their size, often have three major advantages. As a company grows, it must transform the characteristics that gave it its small-company edge into sustaining advantages.
By definition, small companies tend to be lean, nimble, and close to the customer. The question is how to sustain these advantages and build on them as they grow?
Breakthrough companies eventually transition from "save the customer" organizational heroics to robust systems designed to constantly monitor and enhance the value they are providing their customers.
Four key "compass headings" for navigating this transformation
(i) Understand that to build in structural cost advantages, you often have to spend some money.
(ii) Avoid premature diversification of product lines: Companies often move on to the next product before fully mastering the ones they've already got.
(iii) When it's time to diversify products or markets, let your customers be your guide
(iv) Nothing kills speed, hurts customer satisfaction, and erodes a cost advantage faster than unnecessary layers of management
Erecting Scaffolding
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experiences of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams
Too many growing companies continually try to reinvent the wheel instead of seeking out the very best wheel-makers.
CEO's need to work hard to populate their board and leadership team with the smartest and toughest people they can find, people who will really help raise the bar on performance.
Breakthrough companies are skilled at building scaffolding, networks of resources outside the firm that help propel the firm to the next level.
Breakthrough companies tap a broad spectrum of resource to improve their business including peer networks, boards and advisory boards, investors, customers, vendors and colleges and universities.
Enlisting Insultants
Insultants - careful never to insult anyone - skilled at getting the company to question key assumptions in a way that values everyone's perspective and that keeps the focus on what's best for the organization. Masters at getting their ideas heard, never resort to insulting someone.
A person who consults from the inside - ask tough questions that cause the company to think critically about its fundamental assumptions
When companies lose their way strategically, it is usually because of two management traps:
(i) Myopia - a tendency to focus on the familiar and local at the expense of exploring new territory
(ii) Inertia - a tendency to stay with proven markets and approaches at the expense of developing new capabilities
Breakthrough companies work hard to create an environment where insultants flourish. Specifically they
(i) Celebrate productive failure
(ii) Involve people enough in the issues that they can make intelligent contributions
(iii) Focus on defectors - both employees and customers
(iv) Use humor to encourage frankness and trust
Create opportunities and tools for people to ask questions and post beliefs.
Indentify history of people other then leadership have indentified key opportunities and changes were made because of them
Graduating from tough times U
To achieve breakthrough performance requires a company to "push the envelope" - tough times are a natural by-product
Challenges can bring out the best in the organization by
(i) Forcing it to face facts
(ii) Encouraging prioritization of competing good ideas
(iii) Reminding the organization of the potential of people to pull together and overcome obstacles
To successfully navigate tough times leaders need to
(i) Use their scaffolding - get outside perspectives
(ii) Be aware of complexity and find more then "one" solution
(iii) Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more - openly
(iv) If cuts are required make sure to correctly estimate so multiple rounds are not required
Real challenge of leadership is teaching the organization to keep the pressure on, even when times are good
Final thoughts
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change" - Charles Darwin
The 3 places a leader can have the greatest impact on an organization are strategy, people, and execution
Maybe the best way to "get the right people on the bus" is to create a bus worth riding on in the first place.
Breakthrough companies are filled with great coaches - people skilled at helping people do their very best.
It's not always finding the "right" people you have to also pay attention on developing the people you have. The most neglected skill in business today is coaching.
Strategic planning needs to include more people then just the leadership team - include middle managers, up-and-comers, nay-sayers, and key salespeople.
Strategy has to be translated into specific and measureable goals.
Anyone in a leadership role should definitely read this book
All content above is take from The Breakthrough Company Book
Great job Keith and team!
Jason
Nice focus on small->large transition, but question if the attributes caused success 2008-08-10
This book details a set of transitions in philosophy for companies as they move from being fast-growing startups to much larger companies ($100+ million revenue). Similar to Collins' Good to Great, this is a detailed analysis of a number of successful companies in that range, along with some deep studies of what worked for them. There are a bunch of great stories about what worked, as well as contrasts with specific comparison companies that it didn't work for. I recommend reading it, if only for the chapters on common blind spots of entrepreneurs and the tendency of companies to become risk-averse - and limiting their growth potential - once they become slightly profitable.
The biggest thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that the survey left out many companies that were super-successful during that time period - including Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft. The reasoning was that they had become so big that the study wasn't really geared to deal with them. However, I'm suspicious as to whether that was the only reason, because several of the lessons learned in the study seem contradicted by those successes. For example, the "crown the company" lesson says that in order to grow the leader needs to put the good of the company ahead of the individual. Would you say that of Larry Elision, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates? While none would bury the company, let's be clear - people in those organizations are looking to please the top man, not some corporate vision/guidelines/"spirit."
Vision is the Key to Breakthrough! 2008-06-16
The Breakthrough Company goes where Good to Great left off. Asking the question: How does a company become a Breakthrough Company. An excellent book for anyone to read who is trying to build a company which will turn into a mega corporation.
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