Competitive Strategy Dynamics - Hardcover

Warren, Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471899496 ISBN 13: 9780471899495

Publisher: Wiley, 2002

Synopsis

This book offers a practical, fact-based approach to explain how enterprises deliver performance over time. Rigorous methods explain how to quantify the growth, decline and interdependence within the organisation's resources and capabilities as well as the continuous interactions with competitors and other external factors. These methods create clear and practical pictures of the strategic architecture driving earnings and other performance outcomes, not just for commercial firms, but for non-profit cases too. Management is then well-equipped to answer three crucial questions in their strategy development : why has the business performed as it has to date? where is performance headed in the future if we carry on as now? and how can we alter this future for the better? The book provides the basis for an entire course on the time-based perspective on competitive strategy, connecting strongly to established static frameworks. Alternatively it offers a vital missing component for existing courses in strategy and general management, as well as a key reference text for professionals in corporate development, consulting and business analysis.

About this title

About the Author

KIM WARREN has an engineering background and both an MBA and PhD from the London Business School where he is now Adjunct Associate Professor of Strategic Management. His early career was spent in the oil and petrochemicals industry. He was later retail strategy director for the retailing group, Whitbread PLC during the group's growth and domination of several leisure sectors.

Kim is author of several simulation-based learning materials, covering sectors such as brand management, professional services, retailing, banking and airlines, designed to communicate a rigorous, fact-based approach to strategy. The Strategy Dynamics approach underlying these materials is a popular option to all groups of degree students at London Business School, and is also offered via distance learning from MIT.

Recent consulting and research collaborations include projects with major international companies and top strategy consulting firms, with whom leading-edge models of competitive strategy are being applied in industries as diverse as financial services, car manufacture, software development and telecommunications.

Kim is chairman of The Centre for Strategy Dynamics whose purpose is to provide management education and establish standards of good practice in the application of the Strategy Dynamics approach. He also heads Global Strategy Dynamics Ltd, which publishes simulation-based learning materials and other publications to enhance understanding and management of business situations.

From the Back Cover

The complexity and dynamism of modern industries and businesses has exposed shortcomings in the strategy tools currently in widespread use. Senior management is in urgent need of a practical, fact-based, but rigorous approach for understanding how their organizations function, interact with competitors and their market place, and deliver performance over time. The Strategy Dynamics approach offers a means for accomplishing this task, and building a more confident and prosperous path into the future.

Kim Warren provides a very clear and accessible introduction to the Strategy Dynamics approach in Competitive Strategy Dynamics. He offers powerful but usable frameworks to explain and deliver the key concern of senior managers and investors - business performance through time. In addition to tangible factors such as customers and staff, he shows how to deal with the unavoidable influence of 'soft' factors such as morale, quality, reputation and capabilities. He also explains how the Strategy Dynamics approach is relevant and applicable to all contexts - new venture development, rapid growth, maturity, decline, rivalry, market entry and so on.

Competitive Strategy Dynamics has been written for MBA and Executive Education courses in strategic management, business policy and international management, but the concepts are relevant, too, in other subjects, such as marketing, organizational behavior and new venture development. It is also an important tool for strategy consultants and practising managers, whether in large or small firms, manufacturing or service sectors, public service or not-for-profit organizations.

From the Inside Flap

Professionals and students of strategy are hungry for reliable, fact-based approaches to analyzing business performance and developing strategy. They especially need to understand what drives performance through time, not only to communicate and persuade others of desirable initiatives, but also to provide a sound basis for investors to value firms and their plans. Common approaches to Strategy are often derived from statistical methods, and are inadequate for responding to this need for time-based understanding. In contrast, the notion that business resources accumulate and deplete as time passes is readily understood by management, and is also amenable to rigorous analysis.

Kim Warren explains these underlying principles in terms that managers and students can understand, and through frameworks that educators can teach. The book is built around a wide range of illustrative examples, and supported by short descriptions of real cases. The approach is as applicable to non-profit and governmental cases as to commercial firms.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471899496
• ISBN 13: 9780471899495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352