Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad ISBN: 0875847161 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25
Rating: 5
Summary: Educational and Motivational Material
Comment: Competing for the Future, by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad focuses on new issues and techniques of strategic planning as discovered, articulated, and reported by the authors, both Professors of Business at the University of Michigan. The main message of the book reads as follows: in order for a company to be a success, the company must create its future instead of following other companies into the future.
By "creating the future" the authors understand defining and exploiting yet unknown future market opportunities. The opportunities do not have to be confined to the company's core competencies (although the book places significant emphasis on utilizing those). Instead, the company can choose to find alternate distribution channels, beneficial alliances, and other creative means of reinventing itself. The authors offer a wide array of management tools to successfully perform the corporate definition of future consumer needs.
The authors emphasize the corporate need for continuous innovation and reinvention. According to the book, many once-successful companies have failed because of their lack of regeneration and their erroneous belief in persistence of yesterday's business practices. Among the ways to successful corporate regeneration, the authors credit corporate diversity on the thinking level as successful means for breaking established corporate "myths" of the right way of doing business. The authors note that hiring personnel from outside industries can bring fresh and vital perspective on the present state of an enterprise.
In order to develop the future, a company must first define it. In defining the future today, Hamel and Prahalad suggest building "the best possible assumption base about the future." The "assumption base" is to indicate to management what changes in the company's products, competencies, and consumer interface are necessary in order to address future customer needs. The collective information about the changes of tomorrow comprises company's vision.
In order to create a successful vision of the future, a company needs dedicated senior management that "can escape the orthodoxies of the corporation's current 'concept of self'", and can enlarge the window of today's possibilities as projected into the future. The authors stress that a corporation should stretch the boundaries surrounding its competitive position of today in order to include tomorrow's competition and changes in customer needs. The book defines a successful corporate vision as the one that demands more of the corporation than the corporation is capable of providing today. Such a "stretch" between today's capacities and tomorrow's vision ensures that the company innovates in order to achieve the set goals, whereas "perfect fit [would guarantee corporate] atrophy and stagnation".
The book underscores the importance of basing tomorrow's market vision on core competencies of the corporation rather than on acquisition of other businesses or "grass roots 'intrapreneurship'". According to Hamel and Prahalad, core competencies represent "competitive strength" of an enterprise, defined and agreed upon by the company's general management. Building on the core competencies gives the company an immediate advantage over competition that needs to assemble similar competencies prior to entering the competitive race.
The authors note that corporate vision by itself "does not guarantee competitive success". In order for a company to be profitable, the company's foresight should be accompanied by a sufficient executional capacity. Executional capacity refers to continuous leverage of core competencies accompanied by healthy risk mitigation practices. The authors list several tools that can be used to leverage corporate core competencies in order to take hold of future market opportunities. One of the aforementioned tools is the process of aligning corporate operations based on core competencies rather than products and/or business functions. Operations focused on products and services fragment core competencies, and can subsequently truncate corporate opportunities for growth by disallowing deployment of core competencies when the need arises. Another crucial tool in successful execution of corporate vision is a regular review of core competencies together with competencies benchmarking against existing and potential competition in order to assure the company's market position.
In addition to the ideas cited in this paper, the authors describe myriad of ways to enhance tomorrow's competitiveness of an enterprise. Overall, the book is written in a motivational and comprehensive style. Peppered with real-life examples, the book offers thorough guidance to advance in the future marketplace.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great Up-Date on the Peter Drucker Strategy Model
Comment: I am a corporate strategy consultant who works mostly with FORTUNE 200 companies, and I also write books and articles about strategy. Strategic thinking has gone in and out of fashion in such companies several times in the last 40 years. With this book, Hamel and Prahalad have raised the value of strategic thinking in the current context in an effective way. This book is clearly designed with the large company in mind, where the need to envision, communicate about, and organize for the future is most difficult. By breaking down strategic thinking into the elements described here, the authors make strategic thinking easier for those who have little experience. Interestingly enough, many companies have "banned" strategic thinking in favor of more tactically-oriented programs that produce near-term cost reductions. Our firm recently did a survey of the most successful CEOs, and they reported that they felt that better strategies had the most potential to most improve their companies. These same CEOs also reported that they understood little about how to create better strategies. In such companies, COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE can provide an excellent balance. A good book to read in conjunction with this one is Peter Drucker's, MANAGEMENT, which provides the intellectual heritage for many of these ideas. For people who need more detail than Drucker normally provides, COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE will be the more helpful book.
Rating: 2
Summary: Largely an academic waste of time
Comment: If your really want to understand how to compete for the future, read Crossing the Chasm, following by Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey Moore). Competing for the Future will largely waste your time. It is a 100 page book crammed into 300+ pages. The authors spend lots of time repeating fuzzy feel good ideas, and criticizing current managers, but say little that would actually help you compete for the future. They continually cite Apple as the poster child for Competing for the Future (ignoring the fact that the Mac was created in a skunkworks -- a concept they poo-poo.) Yet you can see from Apple's plight today that Hamel and Prahalad have certainly not found the most important thing for long term success. Companies that spend too much time looking 20 years out will never see it, as Apple will not. The truth is that top management can certainly ask themselves "What will competition mean in 20 years?", but they will most certainly be wrong. We live in chaotic times, and the best companies know how to turn on a dime and exploit current emerging markets (Microsoft is great at this). Hamel and Prahalad's books is destined to sit on many shelves, looking very impressive but doing nothing for its readers.
 |
Title: Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life by Gary Hamel ISBN: 0452283248 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 30 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael E. Porter ISBN: 0684841487 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 1998 List Price(USD): $37.50 |
 |
Title: COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE : CREATING AND SUSTAINING SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE by Michael Porter ISBN: 0684841460 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $37.50 |
 |
Title:The Core Competence of the Corporation by C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel ASIN: B00005RZ32 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 05 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.00 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $6.00 |
 |
Title: The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed The Way We Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen ISBN: 0066620694 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
