Article at a glance:

The elusive goal of corporate outperformance

• Only 9 of 1,077 large global companies outperformed their competitors on both revenue growth and profitability over a decade, a study finds—confirming that such strong performance is rare and that many executives impose unrealistic expectations on their organizations.
• Our analysis cannot determine whether certain factors are causes or attributes of superior performance. But the study did find some interesting correlations among the top nine—correlations that may represent a good starting point for exploring corporate excellence.
• Top-performing companies execute fewer mergers and acquisitions that their competitors do, for example, and they generate more value from intangibles.