For nearly a decade, Keith McFarland was frustrated by
the fact that he could never find a book that adequately
described the steps a company could take to solve the
problems involved when moving beyond
the entrepreneurial stages of business toward
something bigger. In the mid-1990s he had
just become chairman of a Los Angelesbased
company that had twice been named
to Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of the fastestgrowing
privately held companies in the
United States.He felt his company was at a
turning point that would soon determine
whether it would reach its full potential for
exponential growth, or if it would stagnate.
Wouldn’t be nice, he thought, if there was a
book describing the experiences of entrepreneurs
who had led their companies to
whole new levels of success?
About the same time that he assumed his position as
chairman,McFarland met Peter Drucker, the man who
essentially defined the science of business management in
the 20th century, and he discussed his dilemma — why
couldn’t he find a decent book that would serve as a road
map for taking his company past the confines of its entrepreneurial
stage? Drucker’s reply was simple:“Because you
haven’t written it yet.”
Fast-forward to 2002, when McFarland was one of two
keynote speakers addressing a conference composed of
CEOs.The other speaker on the bill was Jim Collins,
author of Good to Great, arguably the most successfulbusiness book of this decade.At the conference
McFarland pointed out to Collins that all the companies
described in Good to Great were large organizations, with
average sales figures of $32 billion. But, again,McFarland
was concerned about all those companies that wanted to
break away from the early stages of business development.
Where was the book for them?
The book, Collins advised, could be done using the
same research methods he employed when
writing Good to Great.After receiving
encouragement from two of the most
respected voices in the field,McFarland
was finally inspired enough to set out and
discover for himself how a company moved
from startup to full-blown success.He
wasn’t interested in the General Electrics,
Dells orWal-Marts of the business world
— those companies and others in their
economic strata had been analyzed countless
times.What McFarland wanted were
real-life examples of the businesses that had
broken through the entrepreneurial stage of
development and, if they weren’t raking in
tens of billions of dollars annually, were at least successful
on a large scale. In doing so, he finally found that book
he had been looking for all those years — his own.And
even though he claims that The Breakthrough Company is
not a recipe for creating successful companies, he still
offers plenty of advice on how a company moves from
one level of accomplishment to the next.