Growth is once again top of mind for business executives. As they turn their attention from improving the operational performance of their companies to making those companies grow again, many of them will follow the standard message: consistently strong, value-creating revenue growth lies within reach of major corporations that pursue best practice in strategy, marketing, operations, and organization.

Or does it? Execution and fundamentals are certainly vital, but growth, particularly for the largest companies, requires more than best practice. At the median annual revenue level of today's Fortune 100—about $30 billion—a corporation would in effect have to create a $2 billion company each year to sustain 6 percent top-line growth. Can investors and capital markets reasonably expect that kind of performance? How do some companies achieve it?

To explore the particular challenges of revenue growth in big corporations, we studied the performance of about 100 of the largest ones in the United States, in 17 sectors, over the two most recent business cycles. Almost a third of the companies managed to increase their revenues at a rate faster than the growth of GDP over the second cycle, from 1994 to 2003, while at the same time delivering shareholder returns above...