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Listen to The Closer, Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. I'm talking today

with Chris Dook, a partner at the evening company and a regular contributor to

HBR. His latest book is The Founders Mentality, How to Overcome the Predictable Crisis of Growth, written with is the founder's mentality how to overcome the predictable crises of growth

written with co-author James Allen. Chris thank you so much for talking with us today.

My pleasure. So the way I understand it, the central premise of this book is that we too often look to external

factors when we're trying to grow our companies and what we need to do more is not forget those

internal factors that make such a difference.

Have I sort of gotten the right end of the stick on that and if so, how did you come to those

conclusions?

Sure, well the book was really borne by the collision of two striking statistics that in a sense almost

feel paradoxical one is that right now only about barely one in ten companies in the

world achieve even a modest level of sustained and profitable

growth over the course of a decade on average even though every single company

aspires to do that. It's quite remarkable really that 90% of companies

fall short of their long-term growth objective.

And the second statistic came from a number of fairly large studies we did, each of them about 400 executives around the world,

where we probed the barriers that they perceive to achieving their growth objectives now.

And we found something that we actually haven't seen in 15 years of doing research on growth.

We haven't seen it to this degree, which is that 85% of

executives said that their major barrier to achieving growth was not the absence of

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