Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies Hardcover – Deckle Edge, December 27, 2011

I just finished reading GROW and found it both inspirational and practical. Stengel does a good job of relating 'ideals' and 'purpose' to any business, not just cause related ventures. This topic of 'ideals driven' or 'purpose driven' brands and organizations is being talked about a lot recently, but I believe we're seeing just the beginning of a wave of businesses waking up to the importance of this trend. Only someone with the experience of being P&G's CMO can pull off these proclamations with credibility.Jim provides a great balance of case studies from inspirational companies in his 'Stengel 50' in addition to very personal stories from his own challenging and rewarding career at P&G. The only criticism I have is that Stengel could have done more to emphasize the importance of social networks and tools in empowering consumers to connect with brands and create two-way conversations (he includes this, but IMHO it deserved more focus).The move toward ideals or purpose driven organizations is gaining momentum in many fronts. You can see it among aging boomers... from angel investors backing socially-impactful start-ups, to second-careers in areas that matter to improving peoples' lives. I also see this with the emerging generation of young professionals who bring to the workplace a much stronger commitment (earlier in their career than I found out) to the importance of purpose and balance. Both of these cohorts are going to be important enablers of the 'ideals powered brands' that Jim is espousing.I highly recommend this book to any business professional looking for inspiration, and especially to senior level marketers and general managers who need help in re-igniting their brands and organizations for long term success.

Jim Stengel presents a very vivid case for building a business based on ideals that connect with people. His combination of research, case studies and first hand experience make the book a great read and a thought-provoking guide. The Stengel 50 is certainly a list of businesses worth emulating and the author makes it easy to understand why!

This book has one simple message. Brand ideal is everything. It proves this claim time and time again across different organizations, and each time it shows that talking about brand ideal is one thing, but actually improving people's lives with your brand is a whole different story. This book turns a simple message into a mechanism to succeed for the average businessman.

Jim Stengel is in the fairly small class of people that remain curious about the world around them also when they seems on top of everything. Being Chief Marketing Officer of one of the biggest B2C conglomerates in the world, achieving a turn-around and then opting for further research because you would like to know better what it is you are doing: respect!Stengel loves people, cares about them, you see that on every page. He tries to understand them in order to help them. Help them have a nice day, help them do their tasks in the house, cooking, whatever. In his quest to understand he has come up with the five human emotions that are crucial: joy, pride, exploration, community involvement and social awareness (jpecs). At the same time Jim knows his numbers and can talk about growth figures like any analist, even though for him they are a proof of the other truth: you build a succesful company round the connection with people along these five emotions.His style is down to earth, entertaining, to the point. A book you can't put down. Loved it.

I've always been fascinated by the linkage between culture and a company's brand strength. Jim Stengel and team have arrived at a great structure for defining various purposes that link to human needs, and quantifying the benefits of a operating with a clear purpose in business. I have been using this structure to help frame brand strategies with my clients.

This is an excellent and insightful book about what it means to develop quality brand values that permeate every aspect of a company's operations and consumer interactions. I recommend it to everyone learning about what successful marketing entails.

This book provides the same basic recommendations to enhance your business as any other with may good points. If you learned from other business minded help books, you'll learn some more from this one. If you thought other good selling business help books were wrong, odds are you won't like this one either.

Jim Stengel's book starts at a relatively modest pace, but once it gets underway, it's a powerful addition to the growing understanding that branding is much more than graphics and type styles. Or even advertising and marketing.Perhaps the most important achievement is the way the author demonstrates that fidelity to values and ideals is not the drag on sales and profits that some might have us believe. But rather is the source of growth and profit for an impressive list of category leaders like Apple, HP and P&G.