Five Growth Drivers for Asia's Businesses

by Knowledge@SMU, 30 November 2011

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topics:
Management

tags:
growth strategies M&A sustainability

At a recent seminar organised for the National Trade Union Congress by Singapore Management University’s Office of Executive Education, Philip Charles Zerrillo, a professor of marketing at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, shared some ideas on how organisations can achieve sustainable growth.

Zerrillo, who is also SMU’s executive director for its Post Graduate Coursework Programme, holds a doctorate in marketing from the Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Before he joined the academe, he worked as a stock broker and was also concurrently host of an investment advisory radio programme.

First a quick recap on what ‘growth’ will do for an organisation. According to the seminar participants, a growing organisation will create a greater impact and generate more revenue, which can then be channelled into further investment for future growth as well as create wealth for the organisation and its people.

An organisation with growth momentum will find it easier to reach out to more people and touch more lives, even as it creates better and more satisfying career opportunities for its staff. In the same vein, a growing company, compared to a stagnant one, is certainly more attractive in the eyes of many talented job seekers looking for an avenue for their next challenge.

Optimal value for all

An organisation, however large, cannot function alone. It exists within an ecosystem of sorts. An organisation needs to create value, not just for itself, but also for others within its eco-system.

The way Zerrillo put it, an “optimal value proposition” is created only at the intersection of three types of value: customer value, company value, and what is often forgotten or ignored, collaborator value.

Stripping away the academic parlance, “collaborators” in the real world will most likely refer to, for example, a distributor of a company’s products. So even if the selling price for end consumers is lowered, a company should also try to make sure that the profit margins of its distributors are taken care of.

“If you don’t have something for everybody, things will get a little bit difficult – that’s the importance of collaborators,” explained Zerrillo.

However, before an organisation can try to create value for all, it does help to have some form of guidance, and there is no better guide than what a customer wants. To be sure, there are famous pronouncements by the likes of the late Steve Jobs, who once said that Apple creates products that they think customers will want, rather than what customers themselves think they will want to have.

Nevertheless, not every organisation can be an Apple. In the words of Philip Kotler, one of the biggest names in marketing and Zerrillo’s professor at Kellogg, everything starts with the customer – and business models should be developed from that point.

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