Download or read book Competitive Advantage written by Michael E. Porter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now beyond its eleventh printing and translated into twelve languages, Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations has changed completely our conception of how prosperity is created and sustained in the modern global economy. Porter’s groundbreaking study of international competitiveness has shaped national policy in countries around the world. It has also transformed thinking and action in states, cities, companies, and even entire regions such as Central America. Based on research in ten leading trading nations, The Competitive Advantage of Nations offers the first theory of competitiveness based on the causes of the productivity with which companies compete. Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient. The book introduces Porter’s “diamond,” a whole new way to understand the competitive position of a nation (or other locations) in global competition that is now an integral part of international business thinking. Porter's concept of “clusters,” or groups of interconnected firms, suppliers, related industries, and institutions that arise in particular locations, has become a new way for companies and governments to think about economies, assess the competitive advantage of locations, and set public policy. Even before publication of the book, Porter’s theory had guided national reassessments in New Zealand and elsewhere. His ideas and personal involvement have shaped strategy in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and India, and regions such as Massachusetts, California, and the Basque country. Hundreds of cluster initiatives have flourished throughout the world. In an era of intensifying global competition, this pathbreaking book on the new wealth of nations has become the standard by which all future work must be measured.

Download or read book Beyond Competitive Advantage written by Todd Zenger and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your company is turning in regular profits every year, and its market share is only getting bigger. Competitors can’t touch you. So why is your stock price so sluggish? The answer is as simple as it is cruel: investors aren’t interested in history, and they already know you’re profitable and competitive—that knowledge is baked into your stock price. The hard reality is that a competitive advantage just isn’t enough. Investors want companies to surprise them with unexpected value, which means that you can outperform market expectations only if you as a leader know how to find, create, and deliver a series of multiple competitive advantages. This is why a corporate theory is so important. A good corporate theory provides a compass for those at the strategic helm, guiding their decisions about what assets and activities to pursue, what investments to make, and what strategies to adopt. Behind every long-term corporate success story lies a basic theory about how that company creates value. In Beyond Competitive Advantage, strategy professor Todd Zenger describes what makes a great corporate theory and helps readers understand the many tensions and trade-offs they’ll face as they apply the theory to meet the challenge of market expectations. Based on years of research and analysis, Beyond Competitive Advantage provides managers and executives with a framework for both sustaining value and creating growth.

Download or read book Crafting and Executing Strategy written by Arthur A. Thompson and published by Irwin/McGraw-Hill. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting the most recent developments in research and strategy, this text applies these theories and illustrates their implementation in business cases.

Download or read book The Competitive Advantage of Nations written by Michael E. Porter and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 855 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Competitive Strategy written by Michael E. Porter and published by New York : Free Press ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada. This book was released on 1980 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the comprehensive framework of analytical techniques to help a firm analyze its industry as a whole and predict the industry's future evolution, to understand its competitors and its own position ...

Download or read book A Search for Competitive Advantage written by John F. Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This shortform book presents key peer-reviewed research selected by expert series editors and contextualised by new analysis from each author on how British industrial firms achieved a competitive advantage. With contributions on industrial cartelisation, organisational structure, the quality of British management, marketing and trade marks, labour relations, and technological innovation, this volume provides an array of fascinating insights into industrial history. Of interest to business and economic historians, this shortform book also provides analysis and illustrative case-studies that will be valuable reading across the social sciences.

Download or read book Creating Competitive Advantage written by Jaynie L. Smith and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor? Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider – if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages and trumpeting them to the marketplace is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition. The five fatal flaws of most companies: ? They don’t have a competitive advantage but think they do ? They have a competitive advantage but don’t know what it is—so they lower prices instead ? They know what their competitive advantage is but neglect to tell clients about it ? They mistake “strengths” for competitive advantages ? They don’t concentrate on competitive advantages when making strategic and operational decisions The good news is that you can overcome these costly mistakes – by identifying your competitive advantages and creating new ones. Consultant, public speaker, and competitive advantage expert Jaynie Smith will show you how scores of small and large companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages. When advising a CEO frustrated by his salespeople’s inability to close deals, Smith discovered that his company stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time – an achievement no one else in his industry could claim. By touting this and other competitive advantages to customers, closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues. Jack Welch has said, “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” This straight-to-the-point book is filled with insightful stories and specific steps on how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and get the message out about them. “The biggest marketing flaw in most companies is their failure to fully reap the benefits of their competitive advantages. Either they think they have a competitive advantage but don’t. Or they have one and don’t realize it. Or they know they have a strong competitive advantage but fail to promote it adequately to their customers and prospects. “In my research with middle-market companies, I found only two CEOs out of 1,000 who could clearly name their companies’ competitive advantages. The other 99.8 percent could offer only vague, imprecise generalities. These same CEOs often rely on outside consultants to guide strategic-planning sessions. Yet, in my experience, very few consultants – even seasoned ones – give competitive advantage evaluation more than a superficial glance…. “Ignoring your competitive advantages can be an expensive and even fatal mistake. Because no matter the size of your company or the kind of business you are in, your competitive advantages should be the foundation of all your strategic and operational decisions. They’re the reasons customers choose to buy from you instead of the other guy.” – From Creating Competitive Advantage

Download or read book The End of Competitive Advantage written by Rita Gunther McGrath and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.

Download or read book Competitive Advantage in Investing written by Steven Abrahams and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Links theory and practice for investment professionals and portfolio managers, demonstrating why some portfolios consistently perform better than others Investing well, like any other business, depends on competitive advantage. Some portfolios reliably generate greater returns than others because they simply are better positioned to benefit from strengths and avoid weaknesses. Building and using competitive advantage becomes central to the daily work of the best mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, insurers and virtually every other type of portfolio. But competitive advantage commonly is overlooked in most written work for investment professionals. The literature often varies between abstract formal treatments and pragmatic workbooks with little in between. Competitive Advantage in Investing fills the gap by integrating modern portfolio theory with actual practice in one comprehensive volume. This innovative book guides investment professionals on building and sustaining competitive advantage and helps policymakers and researchers apply theory in a wide range of practical settings. Author Steven Abrahams—Senior Managing Director at Amherst Pierpont Securities and former Adjunct Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School—draws from his experience in both academic theory and real-life strategic investing to bridge the two worlds. This valuable resource: Connects the formal literature on investing to the actual work of most institutional portfolio managers Examines core strengths and weaknesses that drive portfolio behavior at mutual and hedge funds, banks and insurers, at other institutions and for individuals Demonstrates how linking portfolio theory and practice can increase competitive advantage Offers a robust description of investing, markets, and asset value Competitive Advantage in Investing: Building Winning Professional Portfolios is a must-have book for any investment professional, policymaker, or researcher.

Download or read book Competitive Advantage written by Cam Caldwell and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As firms struggle in the modern era to achieve financial success, many recognize that a global economy has made their task more challenging than ever before. Universal access to the latest information and the ability to duplicate technological capabilities make it difficult for firms to sustain previously existing competitive advantages.Business leaders understand that the challenges that they face require a new and much more behavioral approach to managing their companies than has been successful in the past. In this volume, we address the quest for success in a world where innovation and constant change threaten the status quo.Today's successful leaders recognize the importance of creating organizational cultures that build trust, treat employees as valued partners, and provide those employees with the resources to constantly learn.Emphasizing a value-based and behavioral approach to managing employees, many of the chapters of this book address the importance of a strategic approach that is committed to both organizational excellence and the best interests of a company's employees.Nearly eighty years ago, Chester Barnard emphasized that successful organizations both pursue a worthy purpose that benefits society and strive to satisfy the individual needs of its membership. This volume endorses the importance that successful organizations today are committed to values that inspire others, work for the best interests of the global community, and demonstrate a commitment to constant improvement.The theme of this volume is that competitive advantage can best be achieved by leaders and companies that are constantly learning, looking for more effective and efficient ways to assist customers, and those who are dedicated to innovation and the pursuit of excellence.

Download or read book Essentials of Strategic Management written by John E. Gamble and published by McGraw-Hill Higher Education. This book was released on 2011 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title responds head-on to the growing requests by business faculty for a concise, theory-driven strategic management concepts and cases text.

Download or read book Firm Competitive Advantage Through Relationship Management written by Bartosz Deszczyński and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relationship management (RM) is an essential part of business, but its success as a business model can be hard to measure, with some firms embracing a model that is truly relationship-orientated, while others claim to be relationship-orientated but in fact prefer transactional short-term gain. This open access book aims to develop a mid-range theory of relationship management, examining truly relationship-orientated firms to discover not only what qualities these firms have that make them successful at the RM model, but also what benefits this model has for the firm. It addresses questions like how RM-mature companies achieve and sustain competitive advantage, and what determines the scale and scope of these firms, illustrating with case studies. This book will be of interest to scholars studying leadership and strategy, especially those interested in relationship management, business ethics and corporate social responsibility. It will also be of interest to professionals looking to develop their understanding of relationship management.

Download or read book Service Leadership written by Svafa Gronfeldt and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2005-11-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as practical strategies—not just for survival but for a true search for excellence in the uncertain and ever-changing world of customer service management. The theoretical framework is based on the notion that customer service contains three key variables: a promise, a process, and people. After going through the step-by-step process of service management, the reader will have the necessary understanding and skill to choose the right strategy for the right circumstances, to design service processes, to identify the means and methods to implement these processes, and to measure the outcome.

Download or read book UX Strategy written by Jaime Levy and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, UX/UI designer, product manager, or part of an intrapreneurial team, this book teaches simple-to-advanced strategies that you can use in your work right away. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists. Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics

Download or read book Strategy Control and Competitive Advantage written by Erik Jannesson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should firms’ control systems be designed and used to formulate and implement strategies that will contribute to competitive advantage and sustained high performance? This book offers some thought-provoking suggestions. It contains empirical studies of such diverse manufacturing enterprises as Atlas Copco, Electrolux, Saab, Scania, SCA Packing and Volvo, as well as an insurance company and two chamber orchestras. All firms and organizations presented offer interesting and exciting insights, each in a specific way and each with a fascinating history. The book presents research on the relationship between strategy, control and competitive advantage over extended periods and at several strategic levels, while also taking into account the existence of multiple control systems in a single firm or other organization. Readers are offered an in-depth look into how changes in the environment lead to adjustments in strategies and control systems. It is shown, in addition, how difficult and challenging it can be to implement these changes, and why such efforts are not always successful. But perhaps most importantly, the book conveys an in-depth understanding of how strategies and control systems affect competitive advantage and performance. In both its coverage and focus, the book is unique. Not only does it provide valuable contributions to the research field of strategy and management control; it also represents a substantial commitment in terms of resources and involvement over an extended period. The book is highly recommended to researchers, practitioners, graduate students and all others interested in this area.

Download or read book Improving Engineering Design written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1991-02-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Effective design and manufacturing, both of which are necessary to produce high-quality products, are closely related. However, effective design is a prerequisite for effective manufacturing. This new book explores the status of engineering design practice, education, and research in the United States and recommends ways to improve design to increase U.S. industry's competitiveness in world markets.

Download or read book Connected Strategy written by Nicolaj Siggelkow and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.