• Complain

Jeffrey R. Williams - Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time

Here you can read online Jeffrey R. Williams - Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1999, publisher: Free Press, genre: Business. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Free Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    1999
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The task of continuously renewing a company is the greatest challenge confronting any chief executive. To enable managers to project renewal strategies likely to win in the future, Jeffrey Williams has constructed a dynamic road map of outcomes in what he calls economic time, based on a ten-year study of growth, decline, and renewal patterns of hundreds of companies in forty-five industries. In this superbly readable book, Williamss revolutionary, award-winning concept of slow-, standard-, and fast-cycle economic time provides a unifying business language that the multicycle manager can use to compare the renewal opportunities of widely diverse products, companies, and markets. Using examples and studies from companies such as Starbucks, McDonalds, UPS, Compaq, Sony, Merck, Disney, Toyota, IKEA, Microsoft, Sony, Intel, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Chrysler, and Hewlett-Packard, Williams explains that the key idea in economic time is being able to manage products and organizations according to the speed and means by which economic value arises, decays, and is renewed. The drivers of economic time are isolating mechanisms -- a firms unique capabilities that lie at the heart of its competitive advantage -- and that, in Williamss framework, delay product obsolescence. Building on his intuitively appealing model, Williams describes how his three laws of renewal -- convergence, alignment, and renewal -- provide guidelines by which managers can gain command over strategy in complex, dynamic competitive situations. Renewable Advantage is not only essential reading but also will become a standard reference for senior and division managers, business scientists and strategists, and general managers in all industries.

Jeffrey R. Williams: author's other books


Who wrote Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
CONTENTS This book is dedicated with love to Mom and Dad my history To - photo 1
CONTENTS

This book is dedicated with love to

Mom and Dad,

my history

To Rebecca,

in dynamic alignment

And to Benjamin and Stephanie,

our renewal

PREFACE

T his book is about crafting strategy in the new economy. There are new business creatures that behave differently from what our experience has prepared us for. Yet there are older business creatures that have changed relatively little. This work explains how these new creatures are evolving alongside their traditional counterparts. This book is for you if you want to understand whether your business model is changing.

Markets have become unpredictable. The rapid pace of technologies, deregulation, and globalization is changing the business landscape. Airlines, telecommunications, computers, entertainment, health care, industries that have grown up with the information age, are encouraging managers to redefine markets and their responsibilities. Still, other markets remain less touched by change, with companies operating along more or less traditional lines.

How do you know where you belong? Or where you are heading?

This study is based on renewal patterns observed in forty-five industries. This book describes how companies succeed and fail, differently, in different markets. The study, grounded at the business unit level, spans manufacturing, service, high technology, and property-rights industries, and extends across the spectrum of business competition. We obtained evidence by examining companies for similarities and differences in patterns of growth, decline, and rebirth. The effort was guided by economic and organizational theory. Our findings were supplemented by discussions with managers and industry analysts.

Our work showed that managers can strategize renewal in terms of a concept we call economic time. As we came to see it, economic time distinguishes companies from one another by their opportunities for growth. It traces the history of the origin of the business. It predicts the means by which advantage evolves through the mechanisms of value creation that are distinctive for each company. In economic time, companies exist for customers. But also, customers exist for companies. Each gains meaning through the reciprocal demands put on it by the other.

The transforming feature of economic time is innovation followed by imitation. Managers pursue advantage through their own inventions or by rendering obsolete another companys innovations. Through this process, innovation has brought about what fifty years ago the economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted would become the gale of creative destruction.

You seek and gain advantage. Value flows for a time. But then that advantage is lost and must be renewed again. Even managers in the most powerful companies find that success is temporary. Obsolescence is inevitable. Nothing lasts forever.

We will show the differences in thinking and actions that arise from moving away from traditional practice, with its emphasis on the status quo, and toward economic time, with its emphasis on competitive flows, value creation, and renewal. When you accept the fact that nothing lasts forever you expand your styles of management, your opportunities, and your responsibilities consistent with the dynamic forces at work in the new economy.

This work uncovers an order in complex, changing markets. Industries that appear unstable do, in fact, have dynamic patterns, while others that appear stable may be ripe for framebreaking change. The unifying theme is the perspective of economic time, that is, knowledge of the laws of competitive evolution.

Chapter 1 stresses the advent of economic time. This is the transforming insight that business time moves at different speeds. The growth engine of every organization has its distinguishing competitive mechanics, and its own dynamic signature that tells how value for it is created, how products age, and how advantage is potentially renewed. In the multispeed markets of the new economy, renewal comes about through convergence, alignment, and renewal. These laws make the idea that nothing lasts forever universal to management.

Chapter 2 reviews a style of management that is a close cousin to the traditional model, what we call scale orchestration. In standard-cycle markets, economies of scale are important, but equally important is sustaining harmony among product and process innovation and organizational learning. This balanced style of management is focused on no surprises, and zero-defects repeatability over high volume to sustain differentiated cost leadership.

Chapter 3 is about fast-cycle markets, where product half-life is short and where product managers eat their children to survive. The nontraditional success factors of these markets are highlighted along with some new strategies and capabilities best suited for these creatively destructive markets.

Chapter 4 completes the introduction to economic time through the viewpoint of slow-cycle, artisan-like markets. Here, advantage is like a mighty fortress, stable, long-lived, and enduring. Some slow-cycle markets can tip all the way toward one company, providing near-market ownership. The naturally arising growth constraints of these markets can be overcome through what we illustrate as staircase strategies.

Chapter 5 details the three business laws, convergence, alignment, and renewal, that we developed to understand how economic time works. The law of convergence is that nothing lasts forever. The law of alignment says that companies and customers depend on each other. The law of renewal is that 70 percent of economic value does not come from what you do today; it comes from investor guesses of what you will be capable of doing in the future.

Chapter 6 shows how to continually refocus your strategy onto what investors care about: the long-term creation of value. We suggest a few simple ideas that can move you away from an overemphasis on the short term and toward what investorsand ultimately tomorrows customerscare about the most.

Chapter 7 is about management in multiple economic time. When customers want products and services that require a mix of possibly contrary management styles, special efforts are required to coordinate research and development, operations, marketing, pricing, distribution, and service. The basic but complicated question we respond to is, How diverse can my business become and remain effective?

Chapter 8 goes into managing cycle shifts in economic time. This happens when the rules of the game change so much or so fast that they demand radical changes in historical styles of management. Based on our research, we provide early warning signs as to whether your business is shifting in economic time and how to rethink your basic business model.

Chapter 9 explores the origin of renewalinnovation. We look at the different styles of innovation as they operate in economic time. But we also look at styles of innovation that are universal, applying across all cycles of economic time. This chapter has a special section on a topic of individual importanceyour own, personal renewal. We suggest how you can manage your career by the same laws of renewal that apply to business.

Chapter 10 ties together our findings on economic time by summarizing the key findings of the book as a checklist for managers. We conclude with what we came to think of as the seven steps to renewable leadership.

Note that the term renew is used where the more traditional term sustain might be used. Our purpose is to emphasize that no advantage is sustainable forever. Note also that examples are denoted at the point in time that they occur, consistent with our theme that market opportunities are in a continual state of change. Throughout this shifting constellation of opportunities our goal is to show that markets can remain understandable and, most of all, manageable.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time»

Look at similar books to Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time»

Discussion, reviews of the book Renewable Advantage: Crafting Strategy Through Economic Time and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.