The Essential Advantage

CHAPTER NINE

CUT COSTS AND GROW STRONGER

If you are like most executives, you have spent a lot of time thinking about costs. The pressure to reduce expenses—whether this pressure is driven by your cash flow, your shareholders, your uncertainty, or your investment needs—is always present. Frugality, productivity, and efficiency—the need to do more with less—are on every business agenda and have been scrutinized more intensely than ever since the economic crisis of 2008–2009.

But cost-cutting is typically practiced in a way that makes companies weaker and more limited, and most businesspeople assume that this is a necessary part of the exercise. We reject—and you should emphatically reject—this idea. If managed correctly, cost reduction should ...