Getting a taste of The Milkshake Moment.(credit congress: SUPER SESSION HIGHLIGHT)

Companies looking for growth in these currently pressing economic times will try most anything to achieve their goals, whether it's eliminating what is viewed as unnecessary spending or latching on to a new trend in technology or management. But as Steven Little, this year's Credit Congress Super Session speaker, explains in his book, The Milkshake Moment, in many instances, when it comes to growth, organizations are often their own worst enemies.

Relying on his own personal experience as a well-traveled speaker, a highly regarded growth consultant and a lover of milkshakes after a hard day's travel, Little's book outlines the many ways in which senseless organizational systems, rules and processes undermine a company's stated mission and stifle innovation and customer service. Throughout the book, Little, in an easy-going, conversational tone, prods readers to reexamine their own companies, as well as their own lives, and offers them advice on how companies and employees can go beyond the status quo and become more efficient by shifting their focus from profit to purpose.

"Only when organizations get out of their own way can they achieve real, sustainable growth" he says. "Only when we remove our own self-imposed barriers can individuals seize new opportunities in an organizational setting."

Little notes that, due to a senseless managerial rule or standardized process, many companies miss out on common-sense ways to make customers happy. Using an amusing anecdote about the milkshake as a metaphor, Little advises readers to seek out instances when ordinary employees overcome arbitrary rules and arrive at what he calls a "Milkshake Moment" defined as "that precise, critical point in time when members of ...