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322 pages
ISBN 9780875846514 Published Sept. 1996
Harvard Business School Press
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Big Winners And Big Losers - Discipline and Focus Based Strategy Books
Posted Nov. 10, 2005 7:19 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
In Excerpts and Essays - 800 CEO Read Blog

This table is from Appendix A of Big Winners and Big Losers by Alfred Marcus. The bestsellers listed in this table focus on the importance of agility in business strategy.

Book	Main Argument About Discipline	Main Argument About Discipline
Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done	Discipline is integral to strategy execution. Getting the job done is critical. Make sure operations people understand the plans. Link people,strategy,and operations in a systematic process. Tenaciously follow through. Hold people accountable. Reward performers. Get rid of or help nonperformers. Continuously close the gap between results promised and delivered.	Stay close to customers.
James Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Other's Don't	Develop a culture of discipline. Show a fanatical dedication and passion to be the best in the world. Core ideology (principles) should never be jettisoned in the interests of expediency or in times of stress. Straightforward economic metrics like revenue per employee or cost per store should be used. Self-effacing leaders outperform flamboyant ones.	Focus on what drives the economic engine. Do not permit wavering or wandering. Be a hedgehoggo for depth rather than breadth. Do what you can do best, not what you want to do. Make continuous improvements that are evolutionary and not revolutionary in nature. Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restruc- turings almost certainly fail.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action	Communicate clearly and consistently. Tie strategy to implementation. Link performance and incentives to outcomes. Execute by connecting goals to resources. Motivate employees to follow company plans. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.	"To develop advantage, deepen a firm's ties with its current customers.
Donald Mitchell, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model	Never let up. Create a stronghold that prevents entry by competitors.	Outsource to be more focused on profitable endeavors. Increase customer intimacy to understand customer needs and wants. Customize offerings to make them more closely match customer needs. Minimize or eliminate unnecessary costs that burden the customer. Modify pricing or pricing perceptions to increase profitability. Add benefits to the customer's to whom your customers sell. Add benefits by working with your customers partners and suppliers. Continually refine and reinvent your firm's business model.
Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, and Bruce Roberson, What Really Works: The 4+2 Formula for Sustained Business Success	Clearly communicate the firm's strategy. Develop and maintain flawless execution. Support high performance metrics. Simplify the work to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Deliver precisely what customers want. Continually improve the firm's productivity. Keep leaders and directors highly committed to the firm and its goals.	Devise and maintain a focused strategy. Keep growing the core business. Build business around a clear value proposition for customers. Base strategy upon what customers, partners, and investors want. Fine-tune the strategy to changes in the marketplace. Only innovate if you're absolutely certain of industry disruption. In general, beware of the unfamiliar;stick to the knitting.
C.K.Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswany, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers		Allow customers to design their own individualized products. Facilitate shift to experience environments. Deliver value to customers through personalized interaction (cocreation). Dialogue with customers to get insights into their mindset about product risks and benefits. Make customers part of the corporate competence base. Build customer satisfaction and trust. Endeavor to create a unique customer experience across multiple channels and transactions.
Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersman, The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market	Pursue three value disciplines--operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy.	Obsolete your own products before competitors. Do not cater to a wide market. Cater to specific customers whose desires you know well and with whom you have a trusting relationship. Be intimate with a select group of customers. Focus on no-frills products when demand is huge and customers care more about price than choice. Focus on best-performing products when you have ideas for highly desirable, previously unknown products.
Michael Treacy, Double Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It No Matter What	Commit to a conscious, managed set of strategies. Commit to superior value. Use gross profits as the measure of value creation for customers.	Leverage existing advantage. Take small bites. Spread your risk with a portfolio of small initiatives. Derive growth from steady, one-step-at-a-time progress rather than high-risk, bet-the-company transformation. Retain your existing customer base; sell more to that base because it's harder to acquire a new base. Don't drift too far outside your area of expertise; expand mainly in adjacent markets.
Chris Zook, Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence	Build market power in a well- defined core. Don't leave your core unprotected. Do not make errors. Systematically block competitors. Keep costs low for the benefit of customers.	From focus comes growth. By narrowing your scope, create expansion. A well-defined core business is key to competitive advantage. Realize the full potential of your core by moving with caution to businesses that are only adjacent to your core. Avoid misadventures of growth. Only expand or redefine your core when you're forced to in times of extreme turbulence.
Chris Zook, Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots	Employ methods to tilt odds inyour companys favor and control the cost of failure. Identify "adjacencies" in which you're already participating and assess how you're doing (market share, profitability, investment).	Identify adjacencies close by that you are considering or that you might have rejected. Identify other adjacencies that might seem promising because competitors or new entrants are moving to these spaces or because technology or other factors have opened them up. Put together combinations of "adjacency moves" into areas related to your core, such as new product lines or new channels of distribution. Keeps risk down; by moving in well-trod paths close to your core business, there is less risk than by expanding using other growth methods. Competitive advantage comes from what the firm already knows and does best. Push boundaries, but just of your core business. Make small improvements in these dimensions.

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80 Books Every Manager Should Read - 1990-1999
Posted Jan. 14, 2005 8:35 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog

1990-99

1990 Kenichi Ohmae: The Borderless World

1990 Michael Porter: The Competitive Advantage of Nations

1990 Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline

1990 Richard Pascale: Managing on the Edge

1992 Tom Peters: Liberation Management

1993 Fons Trompenaars: Riding the Waves of Culture

1993 James Champy and Michael Hammer: Reengineering the Corporation

1993 Ricardo Semler: Maverick!

1994 Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad: Competing for the Future

1994 Henry Mintzberg: The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

1994 James Collins and Jerry Porras: Built to Last

1994 Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell and Marcus Alexander: Corporate-Level Strategy

1995 Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence

1995 David Packard: The H-P Way

1996 Frederick Reichheld: The Loyalty Effect

1996 John Kotter: Leading Change

1996 Robert Kaplan and David Norton: The Balanced Scorecard

1997 Arie de Geus: The Living Company

1997 Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer: Blur

1997 Thomas Stewart: Intellectual Capital

1998 Patricia Seybold: Customers.com

This is from Financial Times Handbook of Management 3rd Edition.

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Steamship Reads
Posted June 9, 2004 4:13 a.m. by tom-ehrenfeld
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog

In an engaging interview, author Jeff Fox points out that his readers enjoy books they can read on one airplane flight. Indeed, airplane reads engaging lesson-delivery products that can be consumed on a plane ridehave become a staple of the business vernacular, with many editors wary of any tome whose reading time exceeds an uninterrupted New York to Cincinnati flight.

Thats why its somewhat of a miracle to find several excellent recent books that buck this trend. Case in point: the rich, thoughtful, so-smart-its-in-your-face The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin. This is not a subway read (many Japanese managers read short business books on their commute), nor, in fact, is it an airplane read. Call this 450-page book a steamship read.

The 60 pages of footnotes indicate the heft of the highbrow tome. Theres basically more words in their footnotes than you would find in half the book on the current business bestseller list. Not that theres anything wrong with it, as Seinfeld might sayjust another sign that this book is not written with its primary audience in mind.

In fact, the Support Economy falls neatly into a classic consultants category: books and people in desperate need of their own advice. The pundits argue that while major corporations have become ever more efficient they have become increasingly adversarial to a new breed of individualone with a higher consciousness and standard of living. The process of consumption has become ever more complicated and burdensome for individuals. Therefore, the authors suggest concierges for consumers in our economy: paid advocates to guarantee that companies identify and serve the underlying demand of individuals.

Funny: this is just the kind of support most readers need for this cumbersome book. I will admit that I couldnt read it from start to finish. And I cant believe any busy manager will. This leads me to recommend an excellent website where you can get the gist of their argument from the reviews and supplemental material. I read enough of the book to disagree with some of their points (among them the assumption that consumers today are more concerned with finding meaning and psychological self-determination than ever before) but overall, recommend it to those with the time (or an intellectual factotum.)

At any rate, on the return trip of the slow boat to China Id be sure to read Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets Into Tangible Outcomes by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. These two consultant-professors need little introduction, having written one of the key books of the past decade, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action. Expanding on a key HBR article,, the two designed a balanced scorecard enabling a company to describe and communicate strategy in a way that every member of the organization can understand and apply. The tool aligns financial metrics, customer feedback, benchmarks for learning and growth, and internal processes on how the company achieved its goals. Kaplan and Norton followed up with The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment, a sequel showing how companies apply the Balanced Scorecard as the operating system for a new strategic management process.

And now we have Strategy Maps. Weighing in at 438 pages, the book comes chock full of diagrams that seek to deliver on the authors promise of showing how maps can focus a company on realizing key strategic goals. Again, a map for this book would helpthe lengthy text, the myriad case studies, and complicated points are all powerful and carry the weight of authority, but a readers guide would help. For this tired reader, Im saving the book for my next long voyage.

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