Understanding competitive advantage

the importance of strategic congruence and integrated control

This book is about competitive advantage and how it is created at the company level. Our theoretical starting point is that the alignment of strategies and control systems affects the firm's chances of successfully positioning itself in its chosen area of competition. The firm ...

Competitive strategy

techniques for analyzing industries and competitors

Electrifying in its simplicity - like all great breakthroughs - COMPETITIVE STRATEGY captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Author Michael Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies - lowest cost, differentiation, and focus - which bring structure ...

Competitive advantage

creating and sustaining superior performance

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into 'activities', or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Now an essential part ...

Making sense of intellectual capital

designing a method for the valuation of intangibles

Peter Drucker has introduced us all to the knowledge era, where knowledge is the primary resource and intangibles (intellectual capital resources and assets) are now largely recognized as the most important sources of organizations' competitive advantage. With the recognition of the importance of Intangibles comes ...

The man who tried to buy the world

Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal

In 1994, Jean-Marie Messier, a French businessman, had a dream. He would transform a 150-year-old French water company into one of the world#s leading media empires. Over the next eight years he spent $100 billion building Vivendi Universal. By 2002, Vivendi Universal straddled the ...

Getting bigger by growing smaller

a new growth model for corporate America

Large, mature companies always become trapped at some point in the declining stages of what has become known as the corporate life cycle. Historically this barrier to continued growth has been, and is still, as unavoidable as death and taxes. In Getting Bigger by Growing ...

The economics of business strategy

This new textbook examines how industry environment and business strategies determine company performance. It provides an introduction to the economics of business strategy, introducing key concepts drawn from microeconomics, industrial organisation, business economics, business environment, organisation studies and strategic management. The book is written for ...

The game markers

the story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit

In this history of Parker Brothers, Orbanes reveals how, by adhering to the principles of its founder, a small family business grew into an internationally-known brand, overcame obstacles and forged lasting success. Orbanes draws from company archives, interviews with surviving family members and the records ...

The strategic partnering handbook

the practitioner's guide to partnerships and alliances

With the global economy now a reality, the objectives of becoming internationally competitive and world class are imperatives for all successful businesses entering the new millennium. Critical to this success and to the development of sustainable competitive advantage will be the quality of relationships developed ...

Strategic management

Reflecting the challenges of formulating, implementing and monitoring strategy in practice, White's contemporary text discusses differing theories and approaches in the context of real-world experience. Readers are encouraged to conceptualize and generalize business problems and to confront philosophical issues without losing sight of practical ...

Strategic thinking in tactical times

The premise of the book is to provide insight into new ways through which corporations create and execute strategies. It is the result of a 24-hour intensive workshop that brought together over twenty strategy practitioners from multiple industries. They were asked to consider the proposition ...

Culture and positioninig as determinants of strategy

personality and the business organization

Strategic positioning is the assertion of an organizations personality on decisions of how and where to compete, it determines competitive position in the market place and differentiates the offering to the market. Operational positioning is an exercise in communication that concentrates on perception and image ...

Contemporary strategic management

Contemporary Strategic Management identifies, outlines and develops the body of skills, knowledge and expertise that is needed by managers in all senior positions within public and private organizations. Covering analysis and choice, implementation and the development of strategic management from a managerial perspective, the text ...

Key concepts in strategic management

Strategic management is a vibrant and controversial area of management,which is not simply restricted to the actions of senior managers at board level.It requires intuition and judgement, to work alongside structure,rules and procedures.Strategic management is about dealing with ambiguities,uncertainties and ...

European collaboration in research and development

business strategy and public policy

#[This book] addresses the relevant topic of collaborations in research and development at two complementary levels. First, it focuses on their determinants, performance and impact through a survey of more than 500 companies in seven European countries and through case studies on several research joint ...

Strategic business alliances

an examination of the core dimensions

Strategic Business Alliances examines key issues in the analysis, management and performance of international joint ventures using a sample of UK-European equity joint ventures. The authors consider the viewpoint of all configurations of the international joint venture # UK parent, European parent and joint venture management ...

Merging traffic

the consolidation of the international automobile industry

During the past few decades the global auto industry has concentrated into a small number of groups led by GM, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, VW, Toyota, and Renault. The trend is of great political and economic significance because of the large size of the industry, its importance ...

Lexus

the relentless pursuit

A fascinating insight into how Toyota conceived, developed and launched its own luxury car brand Lexus. This remarkable success story will explain how the Japanese giant went from zero to 25% share of the luxury car market in the space of only ten years. Contents ...

La era de las marcas depredadoras

R.Homs vaticina el entorno competitivo en el cual se desenvolverán las marcas tanto en el corto como en el mediano y largo plazos.Además, en esta obra, se desarrolla uno de los planteamientos más importantes del márketing "La teoría de las compensaciones", mediante la ...

Business solutions on demand

transform the business to deliver real customer value

Based partly on IBM#s own transformation, and partly on the transformations that IBM has helped its clients to achieve, this ground- breaking book shows how companies can increase sales and improve margins by introducing a range of solutions INDICE 1.Business strategy and transformation ...