Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity. By Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan. Harvard Business School Press, 250 pages. $27.95.

As much as organic growth has been championed in a raft of business books, that's usually not a reliable option in hard times, when any top-line growth is a challenge. That's why Discovery-Driven Growth, which focuses on out-of-the-box ideas, is especially valuable reading now. Authors McGrath and MacMillan, business school professors at Columbia University and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, are building on a thesis they put forth in a Harvard Business Review article--and propounding a subject, not coincidentally, taught at both Columbia and Wharton.

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The book, they write, is the product of 20 years of research and consulting projects with companies like IBM Corp., DuPont Co., 3M Co. and Nokia Corp., among others. The goal is to "distill practices that allow managers to choose better...