The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy

Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage, Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with coherence: a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.

Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its chosen markets. Based on extensive research and filled with company examples—including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble—Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes.

The authors reveal:

· Why you should focus on a system of a few aligned capabilities

· How to identify the "way to play" in your market

· How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth

· How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system

· How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and people decisions

Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.

Paul Leinwand is a Partner in Booz & Company's global consumer, media, and retail practice. He serves as chair of the firm's Marketing Advisory Council. Cesare Mainardi is Managing Director of Booz & Company's North American business and is a member of the firm's Executive Committee. In 2005, Consulting magazine named him in its Top 25 Consultants list.