Edward D. Hess

In The Road to Organic Growth, Hess describes a study his team conducted on 1,000 EVA companies, which are put through six tests to isolate 22 high organic growth companies. Hess, then, identifies commonalities among these 22 companies, which he attributes their successful organic growth to. This he covers in the first 20% of his book. The remaining 80% is primarily dedicated to convincing readers that his initial assertions are true, through a painstaking process of describing how each of six common attributes apply to several of the organizations.

After reading this book, I'm not sure exactly where I stand, whether or not I concur with its entire (and painfully redundant) message. I do agree that organizations should focus on and support the factors Hess suggests is important to organic growth (i.e. employee engagement; servant leadership; respectful, entrepreneurial cultures; and so on). However, something about the delivery of this message made it questionable. The study Hess conducted to find organic growth companies had a number of significant limitations (i.e. EVA is not the only way to measure the value of an asset or investment), and seemed designed to corroborate his original opinion about profitable organizational growth rather than produce a more objective study on this topic.

In my opinion, the message about the factors organizations should attend to and hone seems sufficiently positive, but the study, itself, questionable. Still, though the idea seems believable, this book alone did not convince me that organic growth is more desirable than its alternative.… (más)