CompetitiveEdge:A Guide to Business Programs 2013


Book Description

Peterson's CompetitiveEdge: A Guide to Graduate Business Programs 2013 is a user-friendly guide to hundreds of graduate business programs in the United States, Canada, and abroad. Readers will find easy-to-read narrative descriptions that focus on the essential information that defines each business school or program, with photos offering a look at the faces of students, faculty, and important campus locales. Quick Facts offer indispensible data on costs and financial aid information, application deadlines, valuable contact information, and more. Also includes enlightening articles on today's MBA degree, admissions and application advice, new business programs, and more.




Outsmart the MBA Clones


Book Description

Dan Herman's book is not really about M.B.A.s; it's just badly titled. Actually, his subject is the continuing power of product differentiation, and he is challenging how marketers conceptualize their work. He explains how to "electrify" consumers by developing innovative products and services that your "M.B.A.-clone" competitors are reluctant to imitate, thereby handing you a monopoly. Herman comes out swinging as a bold strategist, but because his thinking is both nuanced and complex, his book is sometimes difficult to follow. Still, getAbstract considers it a useful text in marketing strategy and recommends it to marketers of all stripes. Even if you decide not to follow Herman's logic down all its paths, you can harness his clever ideas and out-market all those M.B.A. clones.




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.




Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life


Book Description

The international bestseller—don't compete without it! A major bestseller in Japan, Financial Times Top Ten book of the year, Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller, and required reading at the best business schools, Thinking Strategically is a crash course in outmaneuvering any rival. This entertaining guide builds on scores of case studies taken from business, sports, the movies, politics, and gambling. It outlines the basics of good strategy making and then shows how you can apply them in any area of your life.




Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge


Book Description

Combat flat sales, capture new markets, and drive innovation using the Business Genome approach The Business Genome is a proprietary database that tracks company data, maps it across data of all industries, detects patterns, and determines precisely how that company should plan for the future. In Find Your Next, Business Genome creator Andrea Kates explains how to ensure growth and prosperity in years to come. She provides the tools you need to create you business “genome,” or DNA—your company’s unique position in today’s market based on strengths, challenges, industry trends, and other factors—match it to that of a successful company in another industry, then model your own decisions on those of the matching company.




The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting


Book Description

'The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting: What your professors don't tell you... What you absolutely must know' reveals the secret expectations harbored by business school professors when viewing presented material. Designed to offer a competitive advantage to anyone interested in a career in business, this award-winning guide offers a truly unique means of developing powerful presentation skills. It identifies seven verities of speaking that form the bedrock of superior presenting in the twenty-first century, and which imbue any speaker with power, energy and confidence: stance, voice, gesture, expression, movement, appearance and passion. These principles, when studied and applied, can form the foundation of a vast improvement, operating by correlating directly with the inherent values of corporate America.




Competitive Advantage


Book Description

Now beyond its eleventh printing and translated into twelve languages, Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations has changed completely our conception of how prosperity is created and sustained in the modern global economy. Porter’s groundbreaking study of international competitiveness has shaped national policy in countries around the world. It has also transformed thinking and action in states, cities, companies, and even entire regions such as Central America. Based on research in ten leading trading nations, The Competitive Advantage of Nations offers the first theory of competitiveness based on the causes of the productivity with which companies compete. Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient. The book introduces Porter’s “diamond,” a whole new way to understand the competitive position of a nation (or other locations) in global competition that is now an integral part of international business thinking. Porter's concept of “clusters,” or groups of interconnected firms, suppliers, related industries, and institutions that arise in particular locations, has become a new way for companies and governments to think about economies, assess the competitive advantage of locations, and set public policy. Even before publication of the book, Porter’s theory had guided national reassessments in New Zealand and elsewhere. His ideas and personal involvement have shaped strategy in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and India, and regions such as Massachusetts, California, and the Basque country. Hundreds of cluster initiatives have flourished throughout the world. In an era of intensifying global competition, this pathbreaking book on the new wealth of nations has become the standard by which all future work must be measured.




OPERATIONS,STRATEGY,AND TECHNOLOGY: PURSUING THE COMPETITIVE EDGE


Book Description

Market_Desc: Management; Graduate students of operation management Special Features: · AUTHOR RECOGNITION: Dr. Robert Hayes, Emeritus, Harvard Business School, is the most recognizable academic authority in the field of Operations Management. He is the author and co-author of numerous trade and college books. His Wiley book, Restoring Our Competitive Edge: Competing Through Manufacturing has sold 60,000 copies, and is now in its 15th printing. It was chosen by The American Association of Publishers in 1984 as the best business book on business, management and economics. His article with William Abernathy, Managing Our Way Toward an Economic Decline is generally regarded as the most widely read reprint article in the history of Harvard Business Review.· PREVIOUS TRACK RECORD: Robert Hayes has co-authored two successful hybrid trade/college books. In 1984, he authored Restoring Our Competitive Edge: Competing Through Manufacturing (60,000 sold, of which approximately 20,000 were sold to the college market). In 1990 he was the lead author of Dynamic Manufacturing, for Free Press, (55,000 sold)· AUTHOR PROMOTION: Dr. Hayes maintains an excellent relationship with top executives at Hewlett-Packard, Canton Timken and other Fortune 500 companies, and he will send them complimentary copies to stimulate bulk purchases. Also, the authors will promote the book both to the Production Management Society and The Decision Science Institute. In addition, Dr. Upton will use the text in his executive education courses at Harvard Business School.· COLLEGE MARKET: This book will be strongly considered as the course book for the graduate level operations management course at the top-flight colleges and universities. About The Book: Hayes is a founder of the Operations Strategy field, and all four authors are on the Harvard Business School faculty. In Operations, Strategy, and Technology: Pursuing the Competitive Edge--the long-awaited follow-up to the highly successful classic, Restoring Our Competitive Edge--Bob Hayes, Gary Pisano, Dave Upton, and Steve Wheelwright take a fresh look at the foundations of corporate success. This book addresses the basic principles that guide the development of a powerful operations organization, and describes how a company's operating and technological resources can be applied to create a sustainable competitive advantage in today's new (global and IT-intensive) economy. Achieving a competitive advantage through superior operations is what the authors refer to as the operations edge.




Beyond Performance


Book Description

The secret of achieving and sustaining organizational excellence revealed In an ever-changing world where only a third of excellent organizations stay that way over the long term, and where even fewer are able to implement successful change programs, leaders are in need of big ideas and new tools to thrive. In Beyond Performance, McKinsey & Company's Scott Keller and Colin Price give you everything you need to build an organization that can execute in the short run and has the vitality to prosper over the long term. Drawing on the most exhaustive research effort of its kind on organizational effectiveness and change management, Keller and Price put hard science behind their big idea: that the health of an organization is equally as important as its performance. In the book's foreword, management guru Gary Hamel refers to this notion as "a new manifesto for thinking about organizations." The authors illustrate why copying management best practices from other companies is more dangerous than helpful Clearly explains how to determine the mutually reinforcing combination of management practices that best fits your organization's context Provides practical tools to achieve superior levels of performance and health through a staged change process: aspire, assess, architect, act, and advance. Among these are new techniques for dealing with those aspects of human behavior that are seemingly irrational (and therefore confound even the smartest leaders), yet entirely predictable Ultimately, building a healthy organization is an intangible asset that competitors copy at their peril and that enables you to skillfully adapt to and shape your environment faster than others—giving you the ultimate competitive advantage.




Improving Business Performance


Book Description

No organization is impervious to change. Rather, the survival and growth of an organization is dependent on how well it copes with change. Successful change initiatives consist of the integrated eco-system of its portfolio, programs, and projects. These change initiatives become the delivery mechanisms for implementing the strategy of an organization. Improving Business Performance: A Project Portfolio Management Approach clarifies how the proper application of portfolio, program, and project management concepts can help commercial and non-profit organizations achieve their strategic objectives. Most organizations have been good at devising strategy, but falter during its implementation. Executing strategy well to deliver superior business performance remains a key challenge, which is addressed as the core theme of this book. The book portrays a top-down orientation as well as a bottom-up integration of change initiatives to facilitate alignment to strategy and accommodate mid-course changes. It takes into account existing global best management practices to bring forth an approach that is customizable and useful to organizations in any industry. Describing why portfolio management lies at the apex of change initiative management, the book explains how to design and fine-tune portfolios so they are in alignment with your organization’s overall strategy and business needs. After reading this book, you will understand: How to design the project portfolio structure for your organization How to integrate programs and projects within the portfolio more effectively How to better manage interactions across diverse change initiatives How to maintain focus while managing change to realize benefits The book presents a case study that illustrates the application of project portfolio concepts in practical scenarios. It includes chapters dedicated to transition management, change management, benefits management, and the Enterprise Project Management Office. It also includes templates you can immediately put to use in your own portfolios, programs, and projects.