Hess, Edward D. “Smart Growth-Creating Real Long-Term value.” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, May 14, 2010, 74-83.

The article Smart Growth-Creating Real Long-Term Value reflects the business side of my research question. Business strategy and organization determines the success of a business. Mr. Hess explains how businesses get so caught up with the “Grow or die” mentality, that they lose focus of their longevity. Instead, they should focus on “smart growth.” Smart growth is when inspired leaders and employees come together to focus their efforts on short term growth that will continuously improve the success of a business.

For this experiment, Mr. Hess decided to examine whether there was empirical support for the U.S. Growth Model. He looked into the disciplines of economics, finance, strategy, and organizational behavior and design. After researching several companies, he concluded that continuous linear growth is not viable.

Mr. Hass took a look at 22 high growth companies and studied their secret to success. He concluded that most of the high growth companies lacked several characteristics he though they would have. For instance, most companies did not sell unique products or services, did not have the best talent, did not have visionary or charismatic leaders, and did not have innovation leaders. What gave these companies a competitive advantage was that they had built over time an internal enabling Growth System. Thus meaning that employees were treated with loyalty, so worked hard and gave forth their best effort. These companies had productive chemistry, like a championship caliber sports team who is filled with average players but win it all because they play well together. Best Buy Co. was used by Mr. Hass for an example of a successful business. In 2005 Best Buy Co. needed a change so they undertook a major redesign of its business model in an effort to change from a centralized, top-down, product-centric organization to a decentralized, customer-centric organization. In this new culture they identified their customers as “Kings and Queens,” their employees as “royalty,” and their management as “servants.”

Acts, Behavior, or Events and economic data were the types of data used during this experiment. Meanwhile, ethnography is an example of a data collection method because the researcher observed patterns of how the business was running.