What to Do When Growth Stalls

"We will have no growth before 2010."

That emphatic statement came from Norbert Reithofer, CEO of BMW, in the March 30 issue of Fortune magazine.

Even BMW—arguably the best-managed automotive manufacturer in the world—is not immune to the global economic crisis. And any growth the company does achieve in 2010 won't excite its shareholders if it's just rolling over miserable 2009 results.

As much as we would all like to believe that we're masters of our own destiny, the unfortunate truth in business is that growth stalls. In my research (comprising 60 months, two national quantitative studies, and a host of CEO interviews), I found that in any given year some 15% of companies stall.

Over the course of a decade, more than half of companies stall. That's in normal economic times. Given what we're facing in 2009, it wouldn't surprise me if 50%, 60%, or even 70% of companies report flat or negative revenue growth this year.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz described her friend (and former eBay CEO) Meg Whitman's last few years at eBay, when the company's performance was not so hot, this way: "Every CEO who has left their job recently has left a bit of a mess, because of internal or external circumstances."

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Steve McKee is a BusinessWeek.com columnist and author of When Growth Stalls: How It Happens, Why You're Stuck & What to Do About It (Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2009). Learn more at www.WhenGrowthStalls.com.