Research & Corporate Outreach

Organic Growth Conference

The Center held a conference in October, 2003 entitled “Hitting the Growth Wall: Growth in Large Organizations,” which focused on the challenge of organic growth in public corporations.  Corporate presenters included; Erich Reinhardt, President of Siemens Medical Solutions; Mike Eskew, Chairman and CEO of UPS; Rick Schnieder, Chairman and CEO of SYSCO Corporation; and Phil Kent, Chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting. Additional corporate and academic attendees were:

Philip Anderson	Professor, INSEAD (Singapore), and Director, Internal Centre for Entrepreneurship
Douglas Bowman	Professor, Emory University
Robert Drazin	Professor, Emory University
Raghu Garud	Professor, New York University
Mary Ann Glynn	Professor, Emory University
Andrew B. Hargadon	Professor, University of California-Davis
Edward D. Hess	Adjunct Professor, Emory University
Michael Hitt	Professor, Arizona State University
Duane Ireland	Professor, University of Richmond
William Joyce	Professor, Dartmouth College
Robert Kazanjian	Professor, Emory University
Arun Kumaraswamy	Professor, Rutgers University
Tom Taylor	President, Eastern Division of The Home Depot

 

An edited book of papers presented at the conference, The Search for Organic Growth, Hess & Kazanjian, eds., was published by Cambridge University Press.

Project Eagle: Growth Challenges of High Growth Private Companies

Professors Drazin and Kazanjian are conducting a research project focusing on the challenges of managing high growth in private companies. This research arose from a Center Conference held in April of 2004 entitled “Growing Pains for Growing Companies.”  They have undertaken interviews in over 30 Goizueta Business School Eagles firms to understand how they manage high rates of growth. To qualify as a Goizueta Business School Eagle a firm must have had at least 3 years of growth at a compounded annual rate of 30%. Many of these firms double or treble their size annually. Results to date show that these firms actively manage their growth rates to keep them in a manageable range. They do so by applying strict filters to the kinds of products and projects in which they will engage. This research project is ongoing with the objective of interviewing founders and CEOs of fifty companies.  Results will be published in a book in 2007.

In the spring of 2004, The Center negotiated a joint venture with Innovations Publishing Company to build a database of high growth entrepreneurial companies in the Southeast.  Under the terms of the joint venture, Innovations Publishing has assembled a unique data base representing over 250 pre-IPO, high growth companies located in Georgia and contiguous states.  The Center intends to use this database to conduct regular surveys of these firms to enable longitudinal research on a range of growth and developmental questions that emerge from the book project described above.

Organic Growth in Large Public Companies

Professor Hess concluded a two year study of organic growth which created a financial model comprised of 6 screens utilized to evaluate and rank the quality and character of organic growth in over 800 public companies. At this time, he has conducted 3 separate yearly iterations that produced 22 high performing organic growth companies including SYSCO, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, ADP, Stryker, etc.  This research was reported in both The Financial Times and in Fortune magazine.

Professor Hess then studied the 22 firms that ranked highly for all three years learn how they were able to grow organically and consistently over a long period of time. That research resulted in a book to be published by McGraw-Hill later this year entitled The 6 Keys To Organic Growth: How Great Companies Consistently Grow From Within.