Rethinking Competitive Advantage

How do you gain an edge in the digital world order? “Another book for the ages from a master! . . . Particularly insightful is his emphasis on how the end-to-end individual consumer experience will separate winners from losers in our new digital age.”—Fred Hassan, chairman, Caret Group; former CEO, Schering-Plough and Pharmacia The old ways of creating competitive advantage for your business—such as building moats to ward off competitors—have become dangerous. Giants like Amazon and Alibaba are creating vast new market spaces through a deft combination of tools like machine learning and business savvy that reimagines customer experiences while generating immense shareholder value. A handful of traditional companies, including Fidelity Investments, Walmart, and B2W, have adopted these new approaches to reinvigorate their businesses. Most, however, are stalled—and the clock is running out. In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan, bestselling author and adviser to some of the world’s top CEOs and boards, redefines competitive advantage for the digital-first era, offering a set of new rules to get ahead: • Create an ecosystem with third-party partners to revolutionize and personalize the customer experience. • Empower teams focused on a single task, building a “social engine” that drives constant innovation, fast execution, and customer satisfaction. • Attract funders who understand the big picture: that beyond a certain scale, major upfront spending will turn into a cash-generation machine. Filled with stories that peek behind the curtain of digital behemoths as well as traditional companies that have transformed their organizations, Rethinking Competitive Advantage offers concrete advice and methods to help you conceive of new market spaces and moneymaking models. Competing against digital giants might seem daunting, if not impossible. The necessary computing power is within any company’s reach. By borrowing from these digital winners’ playbooks, traditional companies and upstarts alike can gain an upper hand. Whether you’re in the C-suite or brainstorming the next big idea from your garage, Rethinking Competitive Advantage is the ultimate guide to creating competitive advantage today.

From the million-copy-bestselling author of Execution 'Ingenious . . . An insightful and practical guide for leaders and practitioners at every level.' Forbes Welcome to the age of big tech. The old rules no longer apply. How do companies build a competitive advantage in the digital age? In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan - million-copy-bestselling author and advisor to some of the world's top CEOs - reveals that the tech giants have radically rewritten the rules of business. If you want to win, you need to learn to play a new game. Delving into the inner workings of the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Alibaba, Charan uncovers the six rules that the digital giants use to stay ahead: from their emphasis on creating corporate 'ecosystems', to the way they approach team organisation and moneymaking. And he outlines how to use these rules to transform your business, starting today. 'One of the world's preeminent counselors to CEOs.' Harvard Business Review 'The most influential consultant alive.' Fortune

How do you gain an edge in the digital world order? “Another book for the ages from a master! . . . Particularly insightful is his emphasis on how the end-to-end individual consumer experience will separate winners from losers in our new digital age.”—Fred Hassan, chairman, Caret Group; former CEO, Schering-Plough and Pharmacia The old ways of creating competitive advantage for your business—such as building moats to ward off competitors—have become dangerous. Giants like Amazon and Alibaba are creating vast new market spaces through a deft combination of tools like machine learning and business savvy that reimagines customer experiences while generating immense shareholder value. A handful of traditional companies, including Fidelity Investments, Walmart, and B2W, have adopted these new approaches to reinvigorate their businesses. Most, however, are stalled—and the clock is running out. In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan, bestselling author and adviser to some of the world’s top CEOs and boards, redefines competitive advantage for the digital-first era, offering a set of new rules to get ahead: • Create an ecosystem with third-party partners to revolutionize and personalize the customer experience. • Empower teams focused on a single task, building a “social engine” that drives constant innovation, fast execution, and customer satisfaction. • Attract funders who understand the big picture: that beyond a certain scale, major upfront spending will turn into a cash-generation machine. Filled with stories that peek behind the curtain of digital behemoths as well as traditional companies that have transformed their organizations, Rethinking Competitive Advantage offers concrete advice and methods to help you conceive of new market spaces and moneymaking models. Competing against digital giants might seem daunting, if not impossible. The necessary computing power is within any company’s reach. By borrowing from these digital winners’ playbooks, traditional companies and upstarts alike can gain an upper hand. Whether you’re in the C-suite or brainstorming the next big idea from your garage, Rethinking Competitive Advantage is the ultimate guide to creating competitive advantage today.

Seize opportunity from uncertainty What if you could use strategy to turn market volatility to your competitive advantage? Rethinking Strategy shows you how to anticipate and benefit from emerging market shifts and free your organisation from a cycle of disruption and response. In this ground-breaking book, author and strategist Steve Tighe helps you use scenarios to envisage what your industry and organisation could look like in the future and prepare for what’s to come. Through detailed case studies and practical tools, this guide reveals how to make strategy development your organisation’s principal creative and learning activity. anticipate impending market shifts before they emerge slow down change by making the future familiar unlock the entrepreneurial talent that lies within your organisation mobilise an army of internal advocates to drive strategy execution embed foresight into your planning and innovation processes Have you ever wondered how some companies seem to always be ahead of the curve while others struggle to keep up in today’s ever-changing competitive environment? With Rethinking Strategy, you’ll learn how to make better decisions and thrive alongside increasing competition and uncertainty.

Long-term value creation—the board's new agenda. A big shift in public ownership has created a new set of challenges for boards. Index funds managed by firms like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street represent an emerging class of permanent institutional investors who are focused on creating and preserving long-term corporate value. These investors are stating in no uncertain terms that simply managing for short-term shareholder profit is not acceptable. Bill McNabb, Ram Charan, and Dennis Carey have been on the front lines of these changes with the investment community, corporate boards, and top-level management teams. Since TSR (total shareholder return) cannot keep the short and long term in balance, the authors argue, boards should focus on a different kind of TSR—talent, strategy, and risk—because decisions and actions around these factors, more than any others, determine whether or not a company creates long-term value. This book redefines the board's agenda and explains how to: Build and incentivize the right leadership team Help leaders take a longer view and communicate it to investors Refresh board composition and create diversity to meet the new challenges Keep major risks, such as cyberattacks and sexual harassment allegations, front and center Analyze the business through the eyes of a shareholder activist With the new realities of corporate ownership, boards need to lead for the long term. This authoritative book shows them how.

"a provocative new book" — The New York Times AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value. Now with a new preface that explores how the coronavirus crisis compelled organizations such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Verizon, and IKEA to transform themselves with remarkable speed, Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning—to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions. When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani: Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models Explain how "collisions" between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition, altering the structure of our economy, and forcing traditional companies to rearchitect their operating models Explain the opportunities and risks created by digital firms Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of both digital and traditional firms Packed with examples—including many from the most powerful and innovative global, AI-driven competitors—and based on research in hundreds of firms across many sectors, this is your essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI.

Rethink your business for the digital age. Every business begun before the Internet now faces the same challenge: How to transform to compete in a digital economy? Globally recognized digital expert David L. Rogers argues that digital transformation is not about updating your technology but about upgrading your strategic thinking. Based on Rogers's decade of research and teaching at Columbia Business School, and his consulting for businesses around the world, The Digital Transformation Playbook shows how pre-digital-era companies can reinvigorate their game plans and capture the new opportunities of the digital world. Rogers shows why traditional businesses need to rethink their underlying assumptions in five domains of strategy—customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. He reveals how to harness customer networks, platforms, big data, rapid experimentation, and disruptive business models—and how to integrate these into your existing business and organization. Rogers illustrates every strategy in this playbook with real-world case studies, from Google to GE, from Airbnb to the New York Times. With practical frameworks and nine step-by-step planning tools, he distills the lessons of today's greatest digital innovators and makes them usable for businesses at any stage. Many books offer advice for digital start-ups, but The Digital Transformation Playbook is the first complete treatment of how legacy businesses can transform to thrive in the digital age. It is an indispensable guide for executives looking to take their firms to the next stage of profitable growth.

How could the potential of IT be realised to improve business performance in architecture, construction and engineering organisations? How could organisations unleash the potential of IT to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage? How can organisations migrate from technology to IT-enabled business thinking? Based on the author's twenty years research experience, this book provides a holistic picture of the factors that enable architecture, construction and engineering organisations to explore the potential of IT to improve their businesses and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. It raises awareness of the importance of the organisational 'soft issues' and the role they play in influencing the outcome of IT investments as well as addressing other complementary enablers, such as knowledge management, learning organisations, maturity models and e-readiness measurements. Real case studies are used throughout the book to illustrate various concepts and to provide the reader with a realistic and practical picture. Rethinking IT in Construction & Engineering is ideal for lecturers and researchers in architecture, construction and engineering as well as professionals at managerial level in industry.