Brand Relevance


Book Description

Branding guru Aaker shows how to eliminate the competition and become the lead brand in your market This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies-Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad and more-and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant. Key points: When managing a new category of product, treat it as if it were a brand; By failing to produce what customers want or losing momentum and visibility, your brand becomes irrelevant; and create barriers to competitors by supporting innovation at every level of the organization. Using dozens of case studies, shows how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories, making competitors irrelevant Shows how to manage the new category or subcategory as if it were a brand and how to create barriers to competitors Describes the threat of becoming irrelevant by failing to make what customer are buying or losing energy David Aaker, the author of four brand books, has been called the father of branding This book offers insight for creating and/or owning a new business arena. Instead of being the best, the goal is to be the only brand around-making competitors irrelevant.




Blue Ocean Shift


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic and over 4 million copy global bestseller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step-by-step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space. By combining the insights of human psychology with practical market-creating tools and real-world guidance, Kim and Mauborgne deliver the definitive guide to shift yourself, your team, or your organization to new heights of confidence, market creation, and growth. They show why nondisruptive creation is as important as disruption in seizing new growth. Blue Ocean Shift is packed with all-new research and examples of how leaders in diverse industries and organizations made the shift and created new markets by applying the process and tools outlined in the book. Whether you are a cash-strapped startup or a large, established company, nonprofit or national government, you will learn how to move from red to blue oceans in a way that builds your people's confidence so that they own and drive the process. With battle-tested lessons learned from successes and failures in the field, Blue Ocean Shift is critical reading for leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs alike. You'll learn what works, what doesn't, and how to avoid the pitfalls along the way. This book will empower you to succeed as you embark on your own blue ocean journey. Blue Ocean Shift is indispensable for anyone committed to building a compelling future.




Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition


Book Description

Argues against common competitive practices while outlining recommendations based on the creation of untapped market spaces with growth potential.




Red Ocean Traps (Harvard Business Review Classics)


Book Description

As established markets become less profitable, companies increasingly need to find ways to create and capture new markets. Despite much investment and commitment, most firms struggle to do this. What, exactly, is getting in their way? World-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy have spent over a decade exploring that question. They have seen that the trouble lies in managers' mental models--ingrained assumptions and theories about the way the world works. Though these models may work perfectly well in mature markets, they undermine executives' attempts to discover uncontested new spaces with ample potential (blue oceans) and keep companies firmly anchored in existing spaces where competition is bloody (red oceans). In this bound version of their bestselling Harvard Business Review classic article, they describe how to break free of these red ocean traps. To do that, managers need to: (1) Focus on attracting new customers, not pleasing current customers; (2) Worry less about segmentation and more about what different segments have in common; (3) Understand that market creation is not synonymous with either technological innovation or creative destruction; and (3) Stop focusing on premium versus low-cost strategies. The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.




Blue Ocean Leadership (Harvard Business Review Classics)


Book Description

Ten years ago, world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne broke ground by introducing "blue ocean strategy," a new model for discovering uncontested markets that are ripe for growth. In this bound version of their bestselling Harvard Business Review classic article, they apply their concepts and tools to what is perhaps the greatest challenge of leadership: closing the gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of employees. Research indicates that this gulf is vast: According to Gallup, 70% of workers are disengaged from their jobs. If companies could find a way to convert them into engaged employees, the results could be transformative. The trouble is, managers lack a clear understanding of what changes they could make to bring out the best in everyone. In this article, Kim and Mauborgne offer a solution to that problem: a systematic approach to uncovering, at each level of the organization, which leadership acts and activities will inspire employees to give their all, and a process for getting managers throughout the company to start doing them. Blue ocean leadership works because the managers' "customers"--that is, the people managers oversee and report to--are involved in identifying what's effective and what isn't. Moreover, the approach doesn't require leaders to alter who they are, just to undertake a different set of tasks. And that kind of change is much easier to implement and track than changes to values and mind-sets. The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.




The Business Model: How to Develop New Products, Create Market Value and Make the Competition Irrelevant


Book Description

New product success is often attributed to intuition. Yet, while some products born from intuition do make it big, many others crash and burn. The reason is that intuition is only one aspect of new product development. The other key ingredient of success is having a business model that outlines the ways in which new products will create market value. This book offers a systematic approach to identifying market opportunities and developing breakthrough business models. It outlines the key principles of business model generation, presents a value-based framework for developing viable new offerings, and provides a set of practical tools for creating a meaningful value proposition that drives market success. The business model framework outlined in this book applies to a wide range of companies—startups and established enterprises, consumer-packaged-goods companies and business-to-business enterprises, high-tech and low-tech ventures, online and brick-and-mortar entities, product manufacturers and value-added service providers, nonprofit organizations and profit-driven companies. Practical, actionable, and succinct, The Business Model is the essential reference and how-to guide for everyone seeking to achieve market success: from entrepreneurs to experienced managers, from senior executives to product designers, from those creating new market offerings to those improving on existing ones. This book is for those passionate about building great products that create market value and disrupt industries.




The End of Competitive Advantage


Book Description

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.




Outthink the Competition


Book Description

A Fast Company blogger and former McKinsey consultant profiles the next generation business strategists: the "Outthinkers" "Outthinkers" are entrepreneurs and corporate leaders with a new playbook. They see opportunities others ignore, challenge dogma others accept as truth, rally resources others cannot influence, and unleash new strategies that disrupt their markets. Outthink the Competition proves that business competition is undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift and that during such revolutions, outthinkers beat traditionalists. Outthink the Competition presents stories of breakthrough companies like Apple, Google, Vistaprint, and Rosetta Stone whose stunning performances defy traditional explanation and will inspire readers to outthink the competition. Core concepts in the book include: Discover the Eight Dimensions of Disruption Learn to play by the Outthinker Playbook Develop the Five Habits of the Outthinker Implement the Outthinker Process It's time to buck tradition in order to stay ahead. Outthink the competition and uncover opportunities hiding in plain sight.




Understanding Business Strategy


Book Description

This book cuts through the strategy verbiage to get to the fundamentals of business strategy—its meaning, formulation, and implementation. Challenges to understanding strategy are examined, including institutions and national culture. Strategy theories are not just explained but assessed in terms of their validity, limitations, and applicability across countries, cultures, and organisations. The thinking and works of major strategists like Ohmae, Mintzberg, Porter, Rumelt, Barney, Prahalad, Hamel, Peng, Kim, and Mauborgne are reviewed in the context of strategic thinking, strategy formulation, and strategy implementation. The confusion and consensus in strategy are highlighted. While not prescriptive in terms of telling the corporate leader how to formulate strategy, for there is no one best strategy or one best way to formulate strategy, the book does identify broad approaches to corporate strategy formulation and implementation and the underlying principles. To this extent, corporate leaders and students and instructors of business and management will find the book informative and instructive.




Good Strategy Bad Strategy


Book Description

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.