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WISDOM EXCHANGE


Leading Growth Firms Series of Reports


The Leading Growth Firms Series researches and promotes the effective management practices of CEOs of Leading Growth Firms. Reports are concise, innovative and practical, comprising the growth strategies and tactics of successful small and medium-sized firms. These reports are categorized below by topic. You may wish to download the full report or simply read an overview.


Get Acrobat Reader The following publications are available in PDF format and can be read by Adobe Acrobat®. If you do not have a copy of Adobe Acrobat®, you may download a copy of Acrobat® from the Adobe website.
report cover

Thinking Lean (PDF -  2.54 MB)
Thinking Lean features a range of small and medium-sized firms in various sectors across Ontario reaping benefits from their Lean initiatives. Firms in the report are at different stages of growth, which demonstrates how companies of all sizes and circumstances can profit from Lean. In addition to profiles of CEOs and their Lean champions, the report includes dialogue from a CEO roundtable discussion on Lean, advice from topic experts, insights from Lean practitioners at major corporations, and highlights from a 2007-2008 Management Issues Survey conducted by Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters.
front cover The Mentoring Advantage: Developing leaders and expanding the horizons of your employees and firm (PDF - 1.9 MB)
Mentorship programs can boost a company’s productivity, enhance morale, improve employee retention, contribute to leadership development and aid in succession planning. Companies that practice mentorship, as the profiles in this report show, say that mentoring has a clear, bottom-line impact and is an ingredient of their recipe for success. No longer limited to the traditional senior mentor-junior protégé archetype, mentoring today takes many forms.
front cover Shifting Demographics: The search for talent (PDF - 1.57 MB)
Finding the right employees has always been one of the toughest challenges facing small and medium-sized firms. The bad news is that the labour shortage is going to get worse. In fact, many HR experts believe that all the ingredients of a "perfect storm" are converging on the workplace. The competition for good employees will become as fierce as the competition for good customers. In this report, CEOs of rapidly growing Ontario firms talk about their experiences in finding, recruiting and retaining employees. Experts also provide valuable insights into the changing nature of the workplace and human resources management.
Outsourcing: Alliances for Growth (PDF - 1.4 MB)
Globalization, and outsourcing in particular, is conventionally criticized as exploitive; a means for companies to reduce costs. This perception is simplistic and uninformed. Outsourcing is a form of trade, and like other international trade, it benefits Canada as a whole by increasing markets and further raising our standard of living.
Why Leading Growth Firms Matter (PDF - 359 KB)
Leading Growth Firms are a prime economic asset of Ontario. This report profiles successful CEOs of Leading Growth Firms, highlighting aspects of their leadership in a world where change is ever accelerating. The report discusses the threats and opportunities that these and other CEOs face in their quest for growth, focussing on four particular challenges.

Planning for Succession: CEO Perspectives (PDF - 1.19 MB)
This report is based on a survey of CEOs of Ontario’s leading growth firms. It looks at succession as a leadership issue and explores CEOs' strategies and experiences.

Partnering for Growth - CEO Perspectives (PDF - 1.42 MB)
This report in the Leading Growth Firm Series focuses on strategic partnering and how firms are collaborating to enhance their competitiveness. The research confirms over half of Ontario’s leading growth firms are entering into partnerships and that these relationships are contributing to profitable growth. Business leaders are increasingly viewing partnering as a management competency and growth strategy to drive their firm’s profitability.

High Performing Advisory Boards: CEO Perspectives (PDF - 877 KB)
Over the past year, there has been an intensified focus on the way firms work, especially the role of boards. In private firms, which most Leading Growth Firms are, there is increasing recognition that a CEO cannot continue to build a great business single-handedly. While networks and peer groups support the decision-making process, CEOs are turning to advisory boards to guide some of their key decisions.

Winning Managment Teams PDF Version (PDF - 1.68MB) captures the insights on how CEOs are building high performance management teams to achieve growth and success and what can be learned from their experiences.

CEOs of Ontario’s leading growth firms can leverage their customer relationships to provide an ongoing competitive advantage. Leveraging Customer Relationships to Drive Growth (PDF - 380 KB) highlights that executives are best poised to gain this advantage when they adopt a systematic approach to assessing the full range of benefits and risks associated with their portfolio of customer relationships.
The Dynamics of Growth: Is High Growth Sustainable? (PDF - 173KB) provides evidence that reinforces what we have believed for some time, namely, that leading growth firms are a major source of new jobs in this province. What the study does for the first time is provide data indicating that this contribution is maintained over the longer term and is not, as was sometimes assumed, limited to an initial period of extraordinarily rapid growth.

By positioning themselves to capitalize on the emerging opportunities of E-business, leading growth firms will secure their prospects for growth as the Internet changes the way we do business. The E-Business Readiness Assessment Report (PDF - 350KB) provides an insight into the E-business readiness of some of these leading growth firms.

There is conclusive evidence that there are six stages of enterprise growth through which a company passes as it grows from zero to 100+ employees. The Six Stages of Growth in Ontario's Leading Growth Firms (PDF - 209KB) explores individual characteristics of each stage and provides valuable information about how leaders of high-growth firms manage a business at each point.

Almost 200 presidents and CEOs from some of Ontario's fastest-growing firms gathered at the 1999 Wisdom Exchange in Toronto to discuss the common challenges they face in managing growth. The Growth Builders Report (PDF - 1.17MB) records their insights and experiences.

The Innovation Report (PDF - 917KB) is a record of some of the innovations that have enabled Ontario's most dynamic business leaders to overcome their problems and challenges on the path to rapid growth. It is filled with ideas that any business can adapt to its own particular circumstances, amending the concept appropriately to fit its own context.