Recent research from the Columbia Business School concludes that fewer than 1% of large, publicly-traded companies deliver consistent growth over time. In fact, only 8% of nearly 5,000 companies studied achieved five percent growth or better two years running, and only 4% of companies managed the feat for five consecutive years. Sadly, a paltry ten (10) companies achieved growth of 5% or better for a decade.

How do the “growth outliers” do it? “On the one hand, they’re built for innovation,” says Rita Gunther McGrath, a Columbia professor and one of the study’s authors.  ”On the other hand, they’re extremely stable. Chief executives have come up through the company; strategy and organizational structure stay consistent for long stretches; client retention is unusually high; and the corporate culture is strong and unchanging.”

This new research aligns with our findings that the internal issues of alignment, focus, courage and consistency are critical to corporate success. Of course, if these things were easy to maintain every company would do so. Still, both this study and our own demonstrate that ignorance of the true drivers of corporate growth is still widespread. Steady gains come not merely as a result of brilliant strategy or amazing innovation, but a steady hand at the wheel and a strong culture behind it.

How does your company measure up on these critical metrics? If you’d like a quick analysis, take a simple, confidential self-diagnosis here. If things aren’t firing on all cylinders at the moment, it may give you a sense as to why.

By now everybody knows about Kodak filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company’s stock is basically worthless, after peaking above $90 in the ‘90s. It now has twice as many retirees to which it’s paying pension benefits than it does employees. And Kodak owes its creditors nearly two billion dollars more than it could fetch in liquidation. There’s clearly a mess to clean up.

But there’s also a lesson to be learned from the company’s lost decade. Kodak has in many ways been caught in a perfect storm of market tectonics, those external forces that wreak havoc on growth and profitability. To wit:

Competition: Kodak invented the digital camera, all the way back in 1975. But the company neglected to see how it would redefine the future. Foreign competitors like Nikon, Fuji and Sony did, and they stole Kodak’s market share with increasing velocity.

Economic Factors: Not only had Kodak not anticipated how quickly the market would go digital, the 9/11 terrorist attacks decimated leisure travel and the picture taking that goes with it. Even as post-9/11 travel returned to normal levels, film purchases declined 10-15 percent annually in subsequent years. And the economic environment during the past four years exacerbated the problem.

Changing Dynamics: Film industry sales were expected to shrink 10% between 2008 and 2010. Kodak figured its own sales would decline by more like 20%. Turns out it was 40%. To make matters worse, the price of precious metals shot up in part because of federal monetary policy trying to combat the recession (silver is a key component in photographic film).  Thus Kodak got squeezed on both sales and margins.

Along the way Kodak also grappled with the internal missteps that commonly plague struggling companies, most notably a loss of focus. The company explored the manufacture of chemicals, bathroom cleaners, and medical testing devices (among other things) in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And it even tried—too late as it turns out—to make a belated go of it in the digital camera business. Willy Shih, head of Kodak’s Consumer Digital unit in the 1990s, explained the hill the company had to climb. “With digital there is no film,” Shih said.  “You make your money by selling cameras. And you now needed to make components. You needed to make lenses; you needed to make shutters — all kinds of things that the skills for which no longer existed in Rochester.”

Over the past few years Kodak also succumbed to a loss of nerve, pursuing a strategy of IP licensing and lawsuits, then beginning to sell off its patents to generate needed cash. Alas, it was too little, too late.

The lesson? Technologies change. Competitors poach. Economies crater. And growth stalls. It happens to the best of companies (more than half in an average decade, according to our research). But what impacts your company from without is less significant than its impact within. As Fujifilm’s CEO Shigetaka Komori puts it, “As time passes, the fact shows that when a company loses its core business, some companies are able to adapt and overcome the situation, while others are not.”

Kodak made a fateful decision to not pursue digital imaging when it could have had the market to itself, and it failed to evolve quickly enough in a post-photographic-film world. That’s not to point a finger—nobody has perfect information, and all of us stumble.  It’s simply to say that while every company faces dramatic obstacles, addressing internal dynamics is as critical as responding to external events.

They say 40 is the new 30. When it comes to corporate growth, I sure hope so.

Management professors Charles Stubbart and Michael Knight completed a study of more than six million companies and found that only a fraction of them make it to their 40th birthdays.

In another study, economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger revealed that over a 28-year period (1977-2005), some 15% of jobs were destroyed each year, even as the net number of jobs in the U.S. grew by an average of 2% per year.

Those are two stunning statistics. As I explain in When Growth Stalls, our own research revealed that more than half of all companies stall over the course of an average decade–to say nothing of the past half-decade, which has been anything but average.

The lesson? We operate in a magnificent economy where competition and changing dynamics continually spawn new companies, new products and new services, weeding out weaker, less innovative offerings and enhancing everyone’s standard of living. That’s something to celebrate, not to mourn. The reason some jobs (and companies) go the way of the dinosaur is because more, newer and better ones arise to take their place.

No one can stop economic progress. The best we can do is recognize how it comes about and try to stay in front of the parade. As I intimated in a recent BusinessWeek.com column, as business leaders our task  is to ensure that we’re on the creative end of “creative destruction”, not the other (much less pleasant) one. If and as we do, everyone will be better off.

Sometimes the obvious needs stating: advertising works.

Oh, not just any advertising. Plenty of companies have been burned by bad strategy, bad execution, or bad execution of bad strategy. But most car wrecks are the fault of the driver. Here are just three examples of the incredible impact a well-thought, well-crafted campaign can have, from a retrospective on some of the more notable campaigns of last year.

Volkswagen debuted its “Darth Vader” commercial on the Super Bowl and the rest is history. 45 million YouTube views and $100 million in publicity later, the new Passat sold more in its first two months on the market than the previous model did in all of 2010.

Eminem made a surprise appearance in a Chrysler spot that was so captivating it’s “Imported from Detroit” tagline went viral and caused research on Chrysler’s website to jump 328%. More importantly, Chrysler sold 77,774 200′s during the first 11 months of 2011, three times the volume of the Sebring (its predecessor) in the same period a year earlier.

The big news this week is the appointment of Scott Thompson as the new CEO of Yahoo! News reports say his first priority is to lead a turnaround of the company’s online ad business.  They also say he’ll play “a big role” in the “ongoing strategic review” that the board is conducting. I would hope so.

But I have a question for Mr. Thompson: what, exactly, is Yahoo? I mean, Google is a search engine. Facebook is a social networking site. Twitter is a microblogging service. Yahoo is…a content company? What does that mean? If Thompson doesn’t have the answer—or at least a vision for getting to the answer—this is going to be nothing more than yet another seating arrangement on the Titanic.

Yahoo’s drift is evidence of a woeful lack of focus. That (arguably) may not be the fault of the board of directors, but telling the new guy to cut expenses and sell harder is not exactly a visionary charge, and more efficiently monetizing a depreciating asset is no recipe for growth. Thompson’s first published comments are somewhat contradictory, saying the company will “be back to innovation and disruptive concepts” (as if that narrowed things) while promising “if we don’t have it, we will find it in the market.” Ah yes, innovation by acquisition.

Yahoo is not a financial statement; it’s a business that got beat at its original game and has since suffered from a loss of identity and lack of vision. You might say it’s “pulling a Kodak”—and we know how that’s ending.

Yahoo either has a core competency and differentiating value proposition or it doesn’t, and one isn’t going to drop out of the clouds. If Thompson and the board can’t nail one down–and soon–they should call the game and give it up.

As we now close the books on four (four!) years of dismal economics, I’m reminded of a post I wrote back in early 2009 tied to the launch of When Growth Stalls. It was a little more than a year into the recession and I called it “Uncertainty is the New Certainty”. While I would have thought it highly unlikely at the time, the post has retained its relevance nearly three years on.

Unfortunately, three years is nothing when it comes to lessons unlearned. Have a look at this excerpt from a book of essays written forty years ago that refers to a paper written fifty years ago regarding an event (the Great Depression) that happened eighty years ago:

As Alan Greenspan points out in “Stock Prices and Capital Evaluation“, the obstacle to business recovery did not consist exclusively of the specific New Deal legislation passed; more harmful still was the general atmosphere of uncertainty…Men had no way to know what law or regulation would descend on their heads at any moment; they had no way to know what sudden shifts of direction government policy might take; they had no way to plan long-range.

Sound familiar? Francesco Guerrera thinks so. In a column aptly titled “Reflections From a Year of Tumult” he says, “Hurtling between New York and Washington in a bouncy metal tube seems an apt metaphor for the year that is drawing to a close…For much of the year, investors were dazed and confused by a cacophony of news, rumors and wishful thinking…the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung 100-plus points from open to close more than 100 times.”

Guerrera doesn’t see the uncertainty abating, not only because 2012 is an election year but because of government’s “hulking shadow over capital markets” and a coming “storm of regulation” that will “unleash its full force in the next few months”. His conclusion: we have the choice between “ramping up risk in anticipation of a global recovery, or keeping the hatches battened down on fears of a prolonged downturn.”

Three years ago I think we all would have leaned toward the former. Given what’s going on in the centers of power both in the U.S. and abroad, I fear a continuation of the latter. Uncertainty, we despise thee.

I don’t often endorse books, let alone blog about them. But Les McKeown’s The Synergist is just too good not to share.

The first few chapters set the arc. They chronicle the adventures of working in teams with archetypical characters like “The Visionary (Hold on Tight, We’re Going to Mars)”, “The Operator (Yay, Let’s Build a Rocket Ship)”, “The Processor (Not So Fast. Where’s Your Requisition Slip?)”, and the inevitable result, “Gridlock”. If you’ve every worked in a team environment, you know where this is going. I found myself chuckling throughout the book as I reflected on my own experiences (and crimes against productivity). It was either laugh or cry.

Enter the Synergist, a champion of maturity and progress whose management style I desperately hoped would reflect my own. Alas, I have some work to do. I won’t spoil the punch line; let’s just say every functioning team needs at least one Synergist.

In business we place a premium on intelligence, but high IQ simply isn’t enough in–and in fact can work against–struggling companies when smart, accomplished members of the management team lock horns. The higher the IQs involved, the worse things can get. A considerable amount of emotional intelligence is required to deal with complex conflicts that rear their heads when things go south.

McKeown has done a valuable service exposing why groups are unproductive (or worse) and empowering those of us who wish to head off disastrous outcomes. It’s not that the “how to” is difficult; it’s the “want to” that’s often lacking. That’s where the Synergist begins, and McKeown unlocks the (surprisingly simple) keys to what comes next.

I’m hoping in the coming year that I can enhance my Synergist skills to help the teams with which I work become more productive. But I’m not stopping there—I’m going to get a copy of The Synergist for every member of my staff. I recommend you pick one up, too.

The longer I’m in the business world the more I treasure the rare and refreshing virtue of humility.

We’re all imperfect people, and marketing is an imperfect business where subjective decisions rule the day—unlike science, engineering and even accounting, there are no tenets of physics, mathematics or even generally accepted accounting principles that can definitively determine whether something is right or wrong, true or false, or will or will not work. It’s funny how we all believe that we know what “great” advertising is, yet all it takes is a night in front of the television, a short drive through the billboard jungle or an hour navigating the web to admit that very little great (read: creative and effective) work is actually borne from all of our efforts.

Despite that, certitude bordering on arrogance often rears its ugly head, and it can come from either side of the client-agency relationship. Whether it arises from fear, insecurity or self-deception, clients that lack humility become reflexive and dictatorial; agencies that lack humility get fired. In either case, everyone loses.

That’s not to say that confidence isn’t vital. We have to genuinely believe in what we’re doing in order not to lose our souls. But there’s a clear line of demarcation between confidence and arrogance, and that distinction, I believe, is humility. It’s the ability—a healthy tendency, in fact—to say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”.  It’s a risky thing to admit, at least in the short term, because it complicates our lives.  But as with many things, there’s a dichotomy to humility. Admitting we don’t know it all is the surest route to improvement, while believing in our own brilliance mires us in the status quo.

Perhaps one reason great work is the exception is that decisions get made from positions of power, and power tends to breed arrogance. It’s the rare corporate leader, marketing manager, creative director or account supervisor who has the confidence to be humble. But when a business relationship is marked by mutual humility, when both parties are willing to say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”, there’s an incredible dynamic at play: People who share the same goals and a common humility lock arms to defeat the enemy of uncertainty and together find a path to success.

Over the course of nearly thirty years in business, I’ve experienced both kinds of relationships. Those marked by humility tend to be long-lasting, creative, rewarding and satisfying. Those marked by arrogance tend to be “nasty, brutish and short.”  It would be nice to know which kind I’m getting into before I do, but that’s not always possible. What is possible is to ensure that those with whom I do business never wonder what they’re getting from me. I’m as far from that as the next guy, but it’s one of the few things I’m increasingly convinced is worth pursuing.

Accenture recently surveyed 200+ B2B companies with revenues of more than a billion dollars and found that a large majority agree on the importance of social media. So far so good. But they also found that only eight percent of those companies are heavily engaged in social media today. Why the discrepancy?

The survey’s authors suggest that it’s because social media is new and “many simply don’t know how to proceed.” No doubt that’s true, but it doesn’t explain the discrepancy between the differing rates of social media adoption in B2C vs. B2B companies. Nobody knows how to proceed, but consumer-facing companies are moving into the learning process more quickly and deliberately.

Another factor may be that it’s easier to connect social media to business goals in consumer-facing situations.  But most professional marketers are past the training-wheels conception of social media as “Facebook-and-Twitter-and-photo-sharing-apps” and understand the power of one-to-one networking and collaboration. There’s got to be another reason.

I have a hunch—more of an observation, actually—as to what that reason may be. Social media itself has a branding problem.

Think about it: In the rough-and-tumble world of B2B sales and marketing, purchase cycles are longer, customers more sophisticated and decisions more complex. B2B marketers have always proudly thought of themselves as different from consumer marketers, and the term “social media” sounds, well, a bit lightweight. This isn’t a party, after all. It’s business.

Within the walls of a consumer company, social media advocacy is cool; in a B2B organization it may be seen as frivolous. Oh, sure, B2B execs will give the concept of social media lip service; it’s so current that they don’t want to appear out of the mainstream by dismissing it. But when it comes to staffing and investing in social media strategy, well let’s just say it’s easy for them to find other priorities.

I’m not sure who invented the term, “social media”, but I’m pretty sure no one considered its branding implications.  No matter. Since nobody owns the brand its perception problem can’t hurt anyone other than those who misjudge it. I guess that’s like a lot of things in life.

Shares of Research In Motion (RIM) have now dipped below book value, and the company continues to lose market share. The numbers speak for themselves, but the headlines tell a more interesting story:

August 31: “RIM Hit With Another Departure As Popular Veteran Steps Down”

September 30: “BlackBerry Maker’s Issue: Gadgets for Work or Play?”

October 5: “RIM’s Blackberry is Losing Fans Fast”

October 13: “For BlackBerry Maker, Crisis Mounts”

October 14: “RIM Tries to Regain Trust of Its Customers”

October 15: “Who Needs a BlackBerry Anyway?”

Just a few years ago, RIM was the popular new kid on the block, dominating the business communications conversation with its dependable, hardworking BlackBerry. As with any company that enjoys healthy gains in market share and margin, however, it wasn’t long before competitors came calling. Add to that mix rapidly-evolving technology in a roiling telecommunications industry and it would be difficult to see how any market leader could remain on top. (Yep. you might even want to consider selling Apple short.)

Whether RIM survives or not, when it becomes a business school case study professors will parse the strategic decisions company execs made (or didn’t make).  What they’re less likely to explore, however, is whether RIM’s external challenges were magnified by dysfunctional internal dynamics.

Consider a few odd facts. RIM has two CEOs—an oxymoron hidden behind an acronym.  Its chief marketing officer (and a handful of colleagues) quit just weeks ahead of the company’s most significant new product launch (the PlayBook tablet computer). Its director of global developer relations—a career employee at the company—left just a few months later to “step back and consider [his] next steps,” according to a Wall Street Journal post-mortem. Following all that, RIM had a wide and painful service disruption, underscoring how internal issues have a way of manifesting themselves as larger problems. What, exactly is going on at the company? Believe it or not, they may not even know themselves—which, oddly enough, is not that surprising.

In our research among hundreds of struggling companies over the past decade, four destructive and often hidden internal dynamics repeatedly reared their ugly heads: a lack of alignment among the management team, a loss of focus in brand positioning, a loss of nerve in execution, and marketing inconsistency. Companies whose management teams have the emotional intelligence to recognize and address these four issues have a chance at recovery; those that don’t tend to not be long for this world.

From the outside looking in, it appears that RIM is suffering from all four factors, but the first and most critical seems to be a lack of alignment among the management team. When market forces knock key execs out of their strategic comfort zones, important decisions need to be made even as the company reels from the shock. Organizations headed by dominant CEOs (Apple under Steve Jobs, Starbucks under Howard Shultz) may have an easier time adjusting to the disruptions due to their command-and-control culture. But most companies have a harder time dealing with change.

RIM appears to have been thrown off its game by the iPhone/Android phenomenon, struggling with whether to stick to its hardcore B2B knitting or try to make inroads into the consumer market—a significant decision, and a situation ripe for internal disagreement.

It’s common for struggling organizations to argue internally over strategy without realizing that trust, clarity and well-defined objectives are more fundamental issues. RIM’s departed employees may have lost faith, coming to the conclusion that the company is lacking a clear vision and mission of knowing what it wants to be when it grows up. That’s why addressing internal dynamics should be its critical first step in turning things around.

Financial results are a function of marketplace success, and marketplace success is a function of strategy, timing, and (some would say) luck. But few in the C-suite appreciate how destructive internal misalignment can be. If RIM (or any company) doesn’t have its head on straight, it’s going to have a difficult time getting where it wants to go.