Great businesses naturally have many things in common: superbly designed products and services, knockout customer experiences, sustained excellence at execution, outstanding talent and teamwork, and great leadership. But there's also something else, an X factor that keeps renewing and strengthening great businesses through good times and bad.

Based on almost ten years of empirical research involving 50,000 companies, Jim Stengel, former director of marketing at Procter & Gamble, shows how the world's 50 best businesses - as diverse as Apple, Red Bull, Pampers and Petrobras - have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes.

In this, the next big idea book, Stengel deftly blends timeless truths about human behaviour and values into an action framework, to show us how by embracing what he describes as 'brand ideals', the world's best businesses can achieve incredible growth and drastically improve their performance.