Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a collaboration among many people. Our clients, colleagues, friends, and families have all made major contributions to our thinking and we would like to recognize and thank them for their support.

 

First, and most important, we want to thank our clients who have encouraged us to develop our ideas. Achieving and sustaining growth in multi-billiondollar corporations is a serious leadership and management challenge. Our ideas have benefited enormously from our work with clients who have taken on this challenge.

 

We thank those who, as reviewers, braved early drafts of this book to give us feedback and encouragement. In particular, we appreciate the frank and constructive voices of Charles Conn, Costas Markides, Anita McGahan, David Redhill, and Phil Rosenzweig in helping us to reshape our thinking.

 

We acknowledge the support of our partners who have supported our multiyear research effort. Beyond funding, our colleagues have contributed enormously to the ideas we put forward on their behalf and to their application in real corporate environments. Without their intellectual challenges and the ability to test our ideas, no book would have been possible. We would also like to note the leadership of Ian Davis, Lenny Mendonca, Scott Beardsley, Gordon Orr, and Peter Bisson, who have been advocates and sponsors of our work inside and outside McKinsey.

 

While scores of other partners have contributed to McKinsey’s work on growth, we would like to mention specifically Claudio Feser, Will Garrett, Carlo Germano, Asmuss Komm, Robert Palter, Stefano Proverbio, Occo Roelofsen, and Stefano Visalli. We also acknowledge the original contributions made by our former partners Steve Coley and David White to our early thinking on growth.

 

Our teams conducted painstaking, detailed analysis and case research that not only formed the analytical basis for our idea development but also provided extraordinarily valuable documentation of case studies. At one time or another, all of the following made significant contributions to our work: Kevin Cheng, Abhijeet Dwivedi, Olga Hallax, Giovanni Iachello, Robert Mulcare, Carlos Ocampo, Amee Patel, Sejal Patel, Mary Rachide, Gajan Retnasaba, Namit Sharma, Christian Sønderstrup, Teun van der Kamp, and Robert Weston. We are also indebted to the hard work of the entire team at McKinsey Knowledge Center in India: Megha Agarwal, Ankit Ahuja, Ripsy Bakshi, Vineeta Chopra, Chintan Dhebar, Sumit Dora, Himanshu Jain, Amit Jeffrey, Dipty Joshi, Vipin Karnani, Rohit Malhotra, Amit Marwah, Devesh Mittal, Bhawna Prakash, Mudit Sahai, Abhishek Sharma, Amit H. Sharma, Ashish Sharma, Sidhartha Sharma, Richa Suri, and Sakshi Trikha.

 

We also want to make a special acknowledgement to Ivan Hutnik and Jill Willder who, through many tireless hours, helped us to synthesize our thinking and express our thoughts more clearly and succinctly. They have been an invaluable source of intellectual challenge, and, indeed, have played a real role in the refinement and articulation of our ideas.

 

Pom Somkabcharti and Martin Liu of Cyan Books have worked with us during this entire research and writing effort. Pom in particular has been an enduring source of encouragement, emotional support, creative magic, and hands-on work to drive our publishing effort. Both have believed in our project from the outset and been tireless advocates for its success. We are truly indebted to them. We would also like to thank Pamela van Giessen and her team at Wiley for all their hard work to make our North American edition a success.

 

And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the professional assistance of Nichole Brien, Marije Kamerling, Vicki Lunceford, and Emma Peachey who helped us through the many iterations of the manuscript. We are thankful for their professionalism and constant support.

 

Finally, we note the influence that McKinsey legend Marvin Bower has had on our thinking. We remember him best by a remark he made at a partners’ conference:

“For the future, my great ambition—and I’m assured it’s being carried out—is that we produce a firm that is going to continue indefinitely into the future. There aren’t many organizations of that sort.”