Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit …

Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term.

Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes.   In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500.  

Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G.  After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor.  This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy.

Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others.
 
Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos,  Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.

The second edition of Growth, Maturation, and Physical Activity has been expanded with almost 300 new pages of material, making it the most comprehensive text on the biological growth, maturation, physical performance, and physical activity of children and adolescents. The new edition retains all the best features of the original text, including the helpful outlines at the beginning of each chapter that allow students to review major concepts.

This edition features updates on basic content, expanded and modified chapters, and the latest research findings to meet the needs of upper undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and professionals working with children and young adults. The second edition also includes these new features:

-10 lab activities that encourage students to investigate subject matter outside of class and save teachers time

-A complete reference list at the end of each chapter

-Chapter-ending summaries to make the review process easy for students

-New chapters that contain updates on thermoregulation, methods for the assessment of physical activity, undernutrition, obesity, children with clinical conditions, and trends in growth and performance

-Discussions that span current problems in public health, such as the quantification of physical activity and energy expenditure, persistent undernutrition in developing countries, and the obesity epidemic in developed countries
The authors are three of the world's foremost authorities on children's growth and development. In 29 chapters, they address introductory concepts and prenatal growth, postnatal growth, functional development, biological maturation, influencing factors in growth, maturation and development, and specific applications to public health and sport. In addition, secular trends in growth, maturation, and performance over the past 150 years are considered. You'll be able to recognize risk factors that may affect young athletes; you'll also be able to make informed decisions about appropriate physical activities, program delivery, and performance expectations.

Growth, Maturation, and Physical Activity, Second Edition, covers many additional topics, including new techniques for the assessment of body composition, the latest advances in the study of skeletal muscle, the human genome, the hormonal regulation of growth and maturation, clarification of dietary reference intakes, and the study of risk factors for several adult diseases.

This is the only text to focus on the biological growth and maturation process of children and adolescents as it relates to physical activity and performance. With over 300 new pages of material, this text expertly builds on the successful first edition.