Fit for Growth: A Guide to Strategic Cost Cutting, Restructuring, and Renewal

The New Year holds one thing for certain: uncertainty. As business leaders find themselves plagued by sluggish growth, increasing geopolitical tension, heightened regulatory scrutiny, and the rapid pace of digital change, 2017 is gearing up to be “the year of the question mark.” How can businesses achieve and sustain growth despite today’s difficult business environment? They must tightly link their growth and cost agendas, freeing up resources to invest into what truly sets them apart.

Fit for Growth is a new book from Wiley by authors Vinay Couto and Deniz Caglar, leading practitioners in business transformation with Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. They are principals with PwC US. The third author, John Plansky, is a former principal with PwC US. Fit for Growth serves as the ultimate handbook on strategic cost management, illustrating the importance of investing resources in what makes an organization unique in the market and cutting costs constructively everywhere else.

“In an environment of near-constant disruption, we are seeing more companies fall into a cycle of sudden, reactive cost cuts. We see this trend reflected in our annual CEO survey where leaders have said that uncertainty in the economic landscape is a top concern for them,” said Bob Moritz, PwC Global Chairman. “With Fit for Growth, we want to show leaders that it is possible to build a strategy that is growth-oriented, sustainable and embedded into the fabric of the company, in the midst of the complexities facing leaders around the world today.”

According to Strategy&’s research, less than 10 percent of companies are actually ready for growth. This is true for companies across a range of sectors, especially those in retail, financial services and healthcare. Slow growth is also affecting the consumer discretionary and industrial products sectors. Focusing on the key elements of the restructuring and renewal journey, Fit for Growth provides the hands-on advice CEOs, senior executives, and middle managers in any sector need to cut costs effectively to come out stronger. It also features 30+ specific company examples, including iconic brands like IKEA, Circuit City, and P&G.

Fit for Growth frames a unique point of view on how companies can stay ahead of the curve and their competition by:

1) Identifying and focusing on a few differentiating capabilities

2) Creating a cost structure that deploys resources to these capabilities

3) Realigning the organization to support this new strategy and focus

When a company manages costs this way, it is ready for growth in any market condition.

To learn more about the book, visit strategyand.pwc.com/ffgbook.  

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

The authors, Vinay Couto and Deniz Caglar are leading practitioners of business transformation with Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. They are principals with PwC US.  The third author, John Plansky, specializes in restructuring global information technology for financial institutions, and is a former principal with PwC US. They have more than seventy years of combined strategy and business transformation consulting experience and applied the unrivalled industry and functional capabilities of the PwC network to solve companies’ toughest problems and help them capture their greatest opportunities.