Stall Points

In this probing study of the growth experience of Fortune 100-sized firms across the past fifty years, authors Olson and van Bever find that great companies stop growing not because of market saturation, government regulation, or other external constraints but rather because of a finite set of common strategy mistakes that appear time after time, across industries, across geography, and across the economic cycle."--Jacket.

Very few large companies manage to avoid stalls in revenue growth. These stalls are not attributable to the natural business cycle. Rather, careful analysis reveals that the vast majority of such stalls are the direct result of strategic choices made by corporate leaders. In short, stoppages in growth are almost always avoidable. This extensively researched book analyzes the growth experiences of more than six hundred Fortune 100 companies over the past fifty years to identify why growth stalls and to discover how to rectify a stall in progress or, even better, avoid one. Board members and executives in companies of all sizes will find this book a practical and essential resource. Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever investigate the incidence and consequences of growth stalls in major corporations, then probe the root causes. Examining hundreds of stall points, the authors conclude that the greatest threat to a company’s growth is posed by obsolete strategic assumptions that undermine market position, and by breakdowns in innovation and talent management. The study includes a selection of practices for articulating and monitoring strategic assumptions and concludes with a self-test built around fifty “Red Flag†warning signs of an impending growth stall.

During the course of an investigation of an axial-flow turbojet engine in the Lewis altitude wind tunnel, limitations on the transient operation of the engine were determined to relation to two altitudes and exhaust-nozzle-areas. Below approximately 70 percent of the generalized engine rotational speed, a high-frequency oscillation (stall) at the compressor inlet limited transient operation of the engine. Over 70 percent of the engine speed, transient operation was limited by a low-frequency oscillation (surge), which occurred throughout the engine.

This volume consolidates selected articles from the 2016 Apprenticeship Program at the Fields Institute, part of the larger program on Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry that ran from July through December of 2016. Written primarily by junior mathematicians, the articles cover a range of topics in combinatorial algebraic geometry including curves, surfaces, Grassmannians, convexity, abelian varieties, and moduli spaces. This book bridges the gap between graduate courses and cutting-edge research by connecting historical sources, computation, explicit examples, and new results.

Flight tests were made with a typical light airplane to investigate possibilities for obtaining reliable control at low flight speeds. It was found that satisfactory lateral control occurred consistently, even under conditions simulating extremely gusty air, at angles of attack approximately 2 degrees below that for the maximum lift coefficient (or the stall of the wing as a whole). This 2 degree margine was substantially the same both with full power and with the engine throttled and throughout the range of center-of-gravity locations tested. Supplementary tests were then made on the control at high angles of attack under actual gusty air conditions, on the possibility of entering spins, and on the amount of elevator control required for normal three-point landings. It was found that with the original plain untwisted wing obtaining the constant 2 degree margin below the stall required widely different elevator deflections for the range of power and center-of-gravity locations tested. Also, none of these settings ws high enough to produce a three-point landing.