In short, growing revenues is job number one in nearly every company. Contraction is not a viable long-term strategy, and “acquiring” your way to growth has resulted in mixed, and in some cases disastrous, consequences for some of the world’s best-known companies. While the goal of top-line growth may be taking on elevated significance,
the challenge of sustaining growth at acceptable levels has proven daunting for the large majority of companies— from 1997 to the present time, the corporations that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average have struggled to grow at a collective rate of more than 5 percent, with a mere after-tax profit hovering near 0.5 percent. Recently, Morningstar underscored the extent to which profitable growth is limited to a small minority of companies with the following comment