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 10-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.