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 How information gives you competitive advantage written by Michael E. Porter and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient.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 The Art of Startup Fundraising written by Alejandro Cremades and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Startup money is moving online, and this guide shows you how it works. The Art of Startup Fundraising takes a fresh look at raising money for startups, with a focus on the changing face of startup finance. New regulations are making the old go-to advice less relevant, as startup money is increasingly moving online. These new waters are all but uncharted—and founders need an accessible guide. This book helps you navigate the online world of startup fundraising with easy-to-follow explanations and expert perspective on the new digital world of finance. You'll find tips and tricks on raising money and investing in startups from early stage to growth stage, and develop a clear strategy based on the new realities surrounding today's startup landscape. The finance world is in a massive state of flux. Changes are occurring at an increasing pace in all sectors, but few more intensely than the startup sphere. When the paradigm changes, your processes must change with it. This book shows you how startup funding works, with expert coaching toward the new rules on the field. Learn how the JOBS Act impacts the fundraising model Gain insight on startups from early stage to growth stage Find the money you need to get your venture going Craft your pitch and optimize the strategy Build momentum Identify the right investors Avoid the common mistakes Don't rely on the "how we did it" tales from superstar startups, as these stories are unique and applied to exceptional scenarios. The game has changed, and playing by the old rules only gets you left behind. Whether you're founding a startup or looking to invest, The Art of Startup Fundraising provides the up-to-the-minute guidance you need.

Download or read book The Discipline of Market Leaders written by Michael Treacy and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it that Casio can sell a calculator more cheaply than Kellogg's can sell a box of corn flakes? Why can FedEx “absolutely, positively” deliver your package overnight but airlines have trouble keeping track of your bags? What does your company do better than anyone else? What unique value do you provide to your customers? How will you increase that value next year? As customers' demands for the highest quality products, best services, and lowest prices increase daily, the rules for market leadership are changing. Once powerful companies that haven't gotten the message are faltering, while others, new and old, are thriving. In disarmingly simple and provocative terms, Treacy and Wiersema show what it takes to become a leader in your market, and stay there, in an ever more sophisticated and demanding world.

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 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 Competitive Drivers for Improving Future Business Performance written by Martins, Carlos and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-03-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The globalized economy, dominated by the diffusion of innovation and social, political, and economic changes, allows people and knowledge to flow without knowing what lies ahead. As new economies emerge and technologies impose significant changes, the internationalization of markets and industries has made defining its delimitation more difficult. Competitive Drivers for Improving Future Business Performance is a conceptualized reference source that discusses the use of digital skills to manage change in volatile contexts and provides fundamental understanding of competitive advantage to guarantee superior performances. To assure this level of performance, a set of choices (drivers) must be created ensuring operational efficiency, innovative products, customer knowledge-base, and focused branding. Featuring research on topics such as consumer experience, strategic leadership, and flexible technologies, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, entrepreneurs, academicians, consulting professionals, researchers, industry professionals, and students seeking coverage on how to improve competitive performance in an era of uncertainty.

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 Handbook of Research on Strategic Innovation Management for Improved Competitive Advantage written by Jamil, George Leal and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovation is a vital process for any business to remain competitive in this age. This progress must be coherently and optimally managed, allowing for successful improvement and future growth. The Handbook of Research on Strategic Innovation Management for Improved Competitive Advantage provides emerging research on the use of information and knowledge to promote development in various business agencies. While covering topics such as design thinking, financial analysis, and policy planning, this publication explores the wide and complex relationships that constitute strategic innovation management principals and processes. This publication is an important resource for students, professors, researchers, managers, and entrepreneurs seeking current research on the methods and tools regarding information and knowledge management for business advancement.

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 Getting Ahead written by Joel A. Garfinkle and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading executive coach pinpoints three vital traits necessary to advance your career In Getting Ahead, one of the top 50 executive coaches in the United States, Joel Garfinkle reveals his signature model for mastering three skills to take your career to the next level: Perception, Visibility, and Influence. The PVI-model of professional advancement will teach you to: (1) Actively promote yourself as an asset and valuable person inside the organization, (2) Increase your visibility to gain others’ recognition and appreciation for your efforts and (3) Become a person of influence who makes key decisions inside the organization. Getting Ahead will put you ahead of the competition to become a known, valued, and desired commodity at your company. For more than two decades, Joel Garfinkle has worked closely with thousands of executives, senior managers, directors, and employees at the world's leading companies, and has authored 300 articles on leadership Offers detailed guidance on how to increase exposure, boost visibility, enhance perceived value for your organization, and ultimately achieve career advancement Explains how to get your name circulating among higher levels of management so others know you, see your results, and acknowledge the impact you bring to the company

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.

Download or read book Strategic Management color written by and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strategic Management (2020) is a 325-page open educational resource designed as an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The open textbook is intended for a senior capstone course in an undergraduate business program and suitable for a wide range of undergraduate business students including those majoring in marketing, management, business administration, accounting, finance, real estate, business information technology, and hospitality and tourism. The text presents examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today's firms and how they go about implementing those strategies. It includes case studies, end of section key takeaways, exercises, and links to external videos, and an end-of-book glossary. The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

Download or read book Some Things are Never Forgiven written by Chuck Bamford and published by BookCountry. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tale of Edison Andrews - A SEER I am apparently a very slow learner or I was so as a child. My mother used to like to tell stories about how I would ask why the color of people’s eyes were changing so much. With much laughter, or fury, or exasperation, or downright anger depending upon her mood, my mother would say that I saw things that simply were not there. My mother was wrong on this one. I did see eyes change and knowing how that change worked gave me an advantage in my life. My ‘gift’ was turned against me and against those I loved when I was an adult, costing me everything that was dear to me. Revenge may be sweetest when cold, but I believe revenge must be exacted! Some things are never forgiven.

Download or read book Better Simpler Strategy written by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the best strategy books of 2021 by strategy+business Get to better, more effective strategy. In nearly every business segment and corner of the world economy, the most successful companies dramatically outperform their rivals. What is their secret? In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee shows how these companies achieve more by doing less. At a time when rapid technological change and global competition conspire to upend traditional ways of doing business, these companies pursue radically simplified strategies. At a time when many managers struggle not to drown in vast seas of projects and initiatives, these businesses follow simple rules that help them select the few ideas that truly make a difference. Better, Simpler Strategy provides readers with a simple tool, the value stick, which every organization can use to make its strategy more effective and easier to execute. Based on proven financial mechanics, the value stick helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen the competitive advantage of their business. How does the value stick work? It provides a way of measuring the two fundamental forces that lead to value creation and increased financial success—the customer's willingness-to-pay and the employee's willingness-to-sell their services to the business. Companies that win, Oberholzer-Gee shows, create value for customers by raising their willingness-to-pay, and they provide value for talent by lowering their willingness-to-sell. The approach, proven in practice, is entirely data driven and uniquely suited to be cascaded throughout the organization. With many useful visuals and examples across industries and geographies, Better, Simpler Strategy explains how these two key measures enable firms to gauge and improve their strategies and operations. Based on the author's sought-after strategy course, this book is your must-have guide for making better strategic decisions.

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.