Corporate Leadership A Competitive Advantage

Virtually every organisation today realises the need to change in order to succeed. Success can only come through good management which, itself, needs to be driven by leaders. This book illustrates how a leader can systematically create a business that is better at satisfying customers, is more effective at using its human resources and is more rewarding to its owners. The authors achieve this by: * looking at how a leader can best understand and quantify the pressures on the organisation from customers, shareholders and existing employees * explaining how the leader can set about formulating a vision and strategy for the business which will respond to these pressures * providing a prescription for defining the array of management practices needed to foster the organisational culture that is best able to facilitate the strategy. This book provides the insights and practical tools for any leader to achieve competitive advantage in their organisation. "This book draws from experience to create a path of light and logic through the most difficult of business territories-the territory of change. The authors maintain careful balance between the academic and the pragmatic, but with the obvious passion for the need to do something to bring the human element back into the world of work." Sir Colin Marshall, Chairman of British Airways and President of the CBI. "For anyone interested in organizational transformation and the human spirit engaged in that pursuit, this is the book not just to read but to have by one's side. This book has the conceptual depth, the gift of clarity and the practical examples that should make it required reading for every leader." Professor Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA and author of Organizing Genius.

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.

Leaders have the power to take their organizations to great heights. The corporate leaders, therefore, need to acquire and continuously upgrade their skills, knowledge base and foresight for building and motivating their teams and creating an atmosphere for success. The book deals extensively with the entire gamut of corporate experience and various disciplines with leadership roles clearly delineated therein. Human angles include the soft-skills leaders need to develop, the ethical code and the moral value systems that make leaders successful are discussed at length in the book. The book takes the students into the corporate leadership psyche as it extends to team building exercises, solving ethical issues as it also deliberates on the difficulties faced by the leaders while bringing in changes in the organisational streams, like corporate structure, culture, plans and policies, besides its vision, mission, goals and objectives. The book offers practical solutions for handling these problems. The book covers all the strategic areas taught in the MBA and PGDM programmes with case studies.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

"The Journey to Competitive Advantage through Servant Leadership" offers a pragmatic "Golden Rule" guide to being a responsible and inspiring leader. A "must read" book for professional and personal enlightenment in what it takes to bring the best out in your people and yourself."

The primary competitive advantage that firms have today is the perspective, outlook, and commitment of their management leaders. International Management Leadership helps you develop the leadership skills that will enable your firm to stay competitive in today's global business environment. From the necessary international perspective, this book provides you with the information you need to understand the competitive factors that distinguish one firm from another and to recognize the determinants of success.Giving you formats and outlines and a fresh perspective of your work, your organization, and yourself, International Management Leadership is much more practical than other management textbooks. You'll learn how to help make your company more effective in the arena of international management leadership as you read about: requirements of and special demands on international managers managerial leadership in the era of knowledge strategic leadership and implementation of strategy management as a fulfillment of purpose leadership of conflict management transformational leadership team leadership Whether you're an individual involved in a management training program, a management consultant, an executive manager, or a student of international management or business, you'll appreciate this book's take on the competitive factors of leadership in international business today. As a textbook, International Management Leadership provides students with a broad perspective on the practice of managerial leadership and organizational life in the global arena--bringing examples to life and going far beyond what is needed to simply pass a course.

In Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage Dhirendra Kumar shows how the Enterprise Excellence (EE) philosophy is a holistic approach for leading an enterprise to total excellence. It does this by focussing on achieving sustainable significant growth in revenue and profitability, reducing the business cycle time, strategically managing the enterprise risk and focusing on the needs of the customer. There may be various organizations within an enterprise but they must all focus on meeting or exceeding customer needs. Therefore, EE is an integrated approach affecting every employee, every functional area and strategy within the organization. Enterprise risk must be identified, assessed and prioritized; developing a growth strategy proposal which leadership has to execute in order to achieve goals. As business leaders spearhead the efforts, they must minimize, monitor and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events and maximize the realization of opportunities. The achievements in Enterprise Excellence can range from greater cost efficiencies, improved market perceptions, fundamental changes to markets, to new product and service offerings. There may also be significant upgrades in skills, technology, and business strategies. The scope of Enterprise Excellence can also range from operations activities, to business functions, to overall organization and to the enterprise as a whole. Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage is a comprehensive reference book for practising professionals, teaching faculty, and students alike.

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.