Competitive Strategy Dynamics

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.

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.