It is a managerial truism that the main task for big, established companies is to increase their revenues.
Cost-cutting, we are told, has run its course. No more can be squeezed out of the lemon. The only way forward is top-line growth.
We are also told, by management consultants who specialise in such things, that chief executives show a puzzling reluctance to confront this.
Most are aware of the necessity to increase revenues. But their first concern, still, is cost control and efficiency.
The chief executives, in turn, are clear about the reason. Their main job is to please the stock market. And the market remains obstinately concerned, not with revenue growth, but with cost-saving and bottom-line earnings.
Without imputing mystic powers to the investment community, it is worth asking what the market is trying to tell us. Is it really true, to begin with, that investors do not value growth in revenues?
Of course not. The market will kill for top-line growth.
But it does not look to old-established companies to provide it. Instead, it is obsessed with start-up companies in growth markets.
Hence the bizarre ratings assigned to e-commerce stocks, such as eToys or Amazon, the online retailers. These companies are explicitly valued on a multiple of revenues.
Efficiency and cost control are neither here nor there. Future earnings are simply taken on trust.
From a macroeconomic point of view, one could argue that the market is quite right.
For a variety of reasons - which we shall come to - established, mature companies find it difficult to move into areas unrelated to their existing business.
For the economy as a whole, it is better that new market openings should be exploited by new companies.
They can do the job faster and more efficiently, precisely because they are not weighed down by the baggage of the past.
As ever, there are apparent exceptions. Take two established UK retailers, Next and Dixons. Next has created a profitable business running call centres for other companies. Dixons has become the UK's first mass-market free internet service provider, and has seen its share price soar as a result.
On closer inspection, neither of these new businesses is wholly unrelated. Next, a clothing retailer, has run its own call centres for more than a decade to service its own home shopping operation.
In slack times, it always rented out its spare capacity. Having developed the expertise, it has since taken to building call centres as a free-standing business.
Dixons, on the other hand, is the UK's leading retailer of electrical goods, including personal computers. Setting up a free internet portal was thus a stroke of genuine imagination.
The target market - PC users - already frequented Dixons' stores. So, rather than advertise its service at huge expense to the general population, all Dixons had to do was stick up posters in its stores and hand a free CD-Rom to anyone who asked for it.
The factor common to these two cases is low risk. Neither required a big start-up investment in time, money or personnel. Both offered a happy combination of large upside and modest downside.
It follows that both companies make good parents of the resulting businesses. Neither has been hampered by the nature of its existing business. In fact, the reverse is the case.
Most of the time, however, it is not like that. Two specialists in the field, Steve Tappin and Rob Anderson of London-based PA Consulting, argue that established companies ought to take more risks in creating new businesses.
But as they also remind us, there are all kinds of obstacles to that. The issue is not one of product innovation, which most companies understand well enough. It has to do with discontinuities: of opportunities thrown up by new technology, deregulation, demographic shifts or whatever.
Suppose a company is confronted with such an opportunity. First, the PA consultants argue, the chief executive has to decide how to structure the pro posed business.
Will it be part of an existing business unit, or a new unit on its own? Or will it be wholly separate, and treated merely as a portfolio investment?
Each of these is problematical. Few chief executives of established companies warm to the notion of handing Pounds 250m to a group of executives in another part of the country, and leaving them to get on with it.
But the closer the venture is to the existing business, the more time the chief executive will have to devote to protecting it.
New ideas always have enemies, and internal politics can be a rough game. And if the sponsorship is inadequate, the important people in the new venture may well drift away.
At the heart of this lies a paradox. Why should an established company feel it has an advantage in a new market, compared with a start-up rival? Presumably, because it has the assets and personnel already in place.
But if the venture is genuinely new, the odds are that, by definition, those are the wrong assets and people to handle it. As Mr Tappin puts it, the old organisation is at once the biggest friend of the new business and its biggest enemy.
Does this mean big old companies are barred from new markets? Not at all.
But the trick, as the consultants argue, is to identify the things that you are already good at, and have not fully exploited.
Suppose you are in paper-making: an industry characterised by vast capital spending and cut-throat pricing. You can build bigger and better mills, but so will the competition. What can you do to break out?
Well, Mr Tappin says, suppose you have a large subsidiary in Francophone Africa, which has a high local reputation for expertise and integrity. Think laterally. There could be other ways in which that Francophone experience and reputation can be exploited.
When advising a company on such matters, the consultants say, they generally start by drawing up an inventory of its capabilities.
In no case in their experience has the company drawn up such an inventory on its own. And normally, they claim, companies are taken aback by the list of things they are good at.
This brings us back to Dixons and Next. There may well be opportunities under your nose which may look like departures, but which you are uniquely qualified to exploit.
However, if the business is genuinely new and unfamiliar, leave it alone. There are plenty of young, thrusting entrepreneurs who can do the job better than you can.
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