Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Grow Your Profits by Streamlining Your Business

by Jamie Bonomo and Andy Pasternak

Managers today are under intense pressure to deliver revenue growth. But as they and their teams respond to this challenge, they may unwittingly introduce complexity that drags down overall profitability. People in design, sales, and marketing, for example, are driven to introduce new products, acquire new customers, and enter new markets—and they often add offerings, channels, brands, and customers one at a time without regard to the cumulative impact on the business.

What is this cumulative impact? As a business becomes more complex, it gets difficult to trace costs to their origins. So senior managers struggle to figure out which offerings and markets are profitable. ...