Creating Business Advantage

Creating Business Advantage
Author: Daryl Woodhouse
Publisher:
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2015
Genre: Industrial management
ISBN: 9781909116436

"Whether you are just dusting off the plans for your very own brand new start-up or you are the owner of a small business looking to grow - in fact whatever stage you are in your business development - this book will help you to: understand and create your competitive advantage; get more from your sales and marketing; become a strong leader and manage your employees; build partnerships both within and outside your company; become an ace at managing cash; get the help you need to thrive and grow."--

Competitive Advantage

Competitive Advantage
Author: Michael E. Porter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2008-06-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1416595848

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 Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient.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.

Beyond Competitive Advantage

Beyond Competitive Advantage
Author: Todd Zenger
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-05-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1633690016

A competitive advantage just isn't enough. 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.

Creating Business Agility

Creating Business Agility
Author: Rodney Heisterberg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118724569

Creating Business Agility: How Convergence of Cloud, Social, Mobile, Video, and Big Data Enables Competitive Advantage provides a game plan for integrating technology to build a smarter, more customer-centric business. Using a series of case studies as examples throughout, the book describes the agility that comes from collaborative commerce, and provides key decision makers the implementation roadmap they need to build a successful business ecosystem. The focus is on Business Agility Readiness in terms of the five major changes affecting the information technology landscape, and how data-driven delivery platforms and decision-making processes are being reinvented using digital relationships with a social business model as the consumer world of technology drives innovation and collaboration. Cloud computing, social media, next-gen mobility, streaming video, and big data with predictive analytics are major forces now for a competitive advantage, and Creating Business Agility provides leaders with a roadmap for readiness. Business leaders tasked with innovation and strategy will find that Creating Business Agility provides important insight from an informed perspective.

The Business of Belonging

The Business of Belonging
Author: David Spinks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119766125

"A tactical primer for any business embarking on the critical work of actively building community."—Seth Godin, Author, This is Marketing "This book perfectly marries the psychology of communities, with the hard-earned secrets of someone who's done the real work over many years. David Spinks is the master of this craft."—Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable The rise of the internet has brought with it an inexorable, almost shockingly persistent drive toward community. From the first social networks to the GameStop trading revolution, engaged communities have shown the ability to transform industries. Businesses need to harness that power. As business community expert David Spinks shows in The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage, the successful brands of tomorrow will be those that create authentic connection, giving customers a sense of real belonging and unlocking unprecedented scale as a result. In his career of over 10 years in the business of building community, Spinks has learned what a winning community strategy looks like. From the fundamental concepts—including how community drives measurable business value and what the appropriate metrics are—to high-level community design and practical engagement techniques, The Business of Belonging is an epic journey into the world of community building. This book is for decision makers who want to better understand the value and opportunity of community, and for community professionals who want to level up their strategy. Featuring a foreword by Startup Grind and Bevy cofounder Derek Andersen, it will give you a step-by-step model for strategically planning, creating, facilitating, and measuring communities that drive business growth. Attracting and retaining community members who are also loyal customers, brand evangelists, and leaders—that’s the goal for today’s connected businesses, and this book is the map to getting there.

Creating Competitive Advantage

Creating Competitive Advantage
Author: Jaynie L. Smith
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2006-04-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0385518447

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

Smart Collaboration

Smart Collaboration
Author: Heidi K. Gardner
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2016-12-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 163369111X

A Washington Post Bestseller Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right. Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms. But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

The Advantage

The Advantage
Author: Patrick M. Lencioni
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2012-03-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118266102

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

Uncopyable

Uncopyable
Author: Steve Miller
Publisher: Sound Wisdom
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1640951717

What separates average businesses from extraordinarily successful ones? Better product? Nope. Your competitor will rapidly reverse-engineer your "secret sauce" and get their "better-than-you" version on the market faster than you can say "Usain Bolt." Better customer service? Guess what? All of your competitors say they provide the best customer service. It's a wishy washy phrase ... a vague generality with no meaningful specific. Better pricing? You're kidding, right? The company that lives on price dies on price. Harsher reality: Almost all industries today struggle with the increasing commoditization of their products and services, putting considerable pressure on prices and margins, leading to fiercer competition. The Solution? You must create an Uncopyable Attachment with your customers. They must see you as not only delivering a superior product but also as a high-value relationship they simply cannot get anywhere else. In Uncopyable, Steve Miller compellingly argues that new advantage isn't found by going "outside the box" - you must actually build your own box. Uncopyable will guide you to achieving an unfair and enduring competitive advantage.

The End of Competitive Advantage

The End of Competitive Advantage
Author: Rita Gunther McGrath
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1422191419

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.