Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink: Why 40% of Your Business Is Unprofitable, and How to Fix It - Softcover

Jonathan L.S. Byrnes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067091956X ISBN 13: 9780670919567

Publisher: Portfolio Penguin, 2010

Synopsis

Companies around the world turn to MIT's Jonathan Byrnes for one reason: he can figure out where the profit is. He shows them which customers and businesses are cash cows, and which efforts are just a drain on resources. Most astonishingly, in each case he finds that roughly 40 per cent of his client's businesses are unprofitable. We are transitioning from an era of mass markets to the Age of Precision Markets. Before, companies sought to distribute their products as widely as possible using arm's-length customer relationships. Broad metrics like aggregate revenues and costs were adequate. But today companies form different relationships with different sets of customers. Successful businesses create competitive advantages and sustained profitability by developing innovative relationships and new types of value. This is a double-edged sword: if customers are matched with the right relationships, sales and profits soar...but if they are matched poorly, profitability plunges. "Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink" tells you how to rethink your business for maximum profit - what to do, what difficulties you'll encounter, and how to overcome them. This book gives you the roadmap and tools you'll need to be a highly effective manager in a new era of business.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan L.S. Byrnes is a Senior Lecturer at MIT. He has authored over 100 books, articles, cases, notes, and expert submissions. He wrote a monthly column on managing profitability, "The Bottom Line," in Harvard Business School's e-newsletter. Byrnes also runs a consultancy through which he has advised over 50 major companies and industry associations. He has served on the Advisory Boards of Objectiva Software and Autopart International, and is currently on the Advisory Boards of danoo, OCO, and WaveMark.

From Publishers Weekly:

The claim made by the author, a Senior Lecturer at MIT, wasn't gleaned from a study; rather, it comes from his own experience as a consultant, and the examples and suggestions in his first book are aimed squarely at managers. Byrnes finds unprofitability almost everywhere--in accounts, order lines, vendors, sales channels, and products–and blames corporations for focusing insufficient resources on the bottom line. Drawing from a monthly column he wrote for a Harvard Business School e-newsletter in the early 2000s, Byrnes offers managers tips on reestablishing a healthy profit, such as creating a profitability database, modeling a customer, creating an action plan, and institutionalizing profit mapping. Thirty-six chapters arranged in four sections (thinking, selling, operating, leading), and dozens of boxed "things to think about" and "lessons for managers" cover profit from the supply chain to the customer. While many of the best-known companies Byrnes references have a whiff of old news about them (Walmart, Dell, GE), case studies of lesser-knowns like Nalco Chemical and SKF Bearings may offer the dedicated reader more to take away. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Portfolio Penguin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 067091956X
• ISBN 13: 9780670919567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304