Rita Gunther McGrath - The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

The End of Competitive Advantage is an incredibly practical playbook for competing in todays dynamic world. Rita McGraths compelling book provides clear guidance for leaders searching for the competitive edges that seem to grow more elusive by the day. A must-read.

Scott Anthony, Managing Partner, Innosight; author, The Little Black Book of Innovation

Rita Gunther McGrath cements her status as one of the top business gurus in the world with The End of Competitive Advantage. She asserts that sustainable competitive advantage is obsolete and offers a thoroughly compelling argument that successfully managing waves of transient advantage is the future of business success.

John Caddell, author, The Mistake Bank (forthcoming)

In todays economy, committing to achieve sustainable competitive advantage is like building the Maginot Line: It locks you into a position from which it is hard to move, and it does not keep the bad guys out. Better instead to adopt Rita McGraths playbook for exploiting transient competitive advantages and get your organization to embrace the fact that the only constant is change.

Geoffrey Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity

How do you strategize when sustainable competitive advantages are gone? You need a playbook for strategy that fits todays fast and uncertain world. You need new methods for organizing and acting to deliver continuous growth and profits over decades. You need a new competitive advantagethis book.

Alex Osterwalder, entrepreneur and cofounder, Strategyzer.com

McGraths central insight is authentic, empirical, and profound. Too many organizations unicorn-hunt for sustainable competitive advantage at the expense of investing in agileand anticipatorystrategic opportunities. This book will provoke useful arguments around creating versus exploiting innovation opportunism.

Michael Schrage, Research Fellow, MIT Sloans Center for Digital Business; author, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

If competitive advantage was ever sustainable, that time has passed. McGraths book not only captures the shortcomings of traditional, static models, but lays out the tools that fuel leading performance. The End of Competitive Advantage will give you an entirely new perspective on how to think about strategy.

Francisco DSouza, CEO, Cognizant

This smart, readable book addresses todays most significant strategy reality: that we are living in an era of transient advantage. Rita McGrath provides a playbook for this new landscape, showing how you can identify opportunities fast, execute against them at scale, and be unafraid to move on when the situation changes.

William D. Green, former Chairman, Accenture

The urge to hold on to ones established competitive advantage is a vicious trap. McGrath clearly establishes the factors central to building a dynamic competitive edge for an enterprise of tomorrow. Refreshing, insightful, and a must-read.

Sanjay Purohit, Senior Vice President, Infosys Ltd.

McGraths groundbreaking work is aptly timed for todays dynamic markets, where winning requires continuous reconfiguration.

Nancy McKinstry, CEO and Chairman, Executive Board, Wolters Kluwer nv

The End of Competitive Advantage makes clear that high-performance teams have to stay vigilant. Are your leaders seizing new opportunities or just trying to optimize an outdated strategy? Keep your head up and stay alert, or a transient advantage might pass you by.

Klaus C. Kleinfeld, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa

As a long-time member of the Rita McGrath fan club, I was delighted to see this book. Her approach to strategy is fresh and practical, and is exactly what managers need today. It acknowledges competitive realities but shows a clear path forward. It is one of the most illuminating takes on how to deal with disruption that I have ever read.

Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Copyright 2013 Rita Gunther McGrath
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to , or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the books publication but may be subject to change.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGrath, Rita Gunther.

The end of competitive advantage: how to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business/Rita McGrath.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4221-7281-0 (alk. paper)

1. Strategic planning. 2. Competition. I. Title.

HD30.28.M38378 2013

658.4012dc23

2012051721

ISBN13: 9781422172810

eISBN: 9781422191415

You jolted me from complacency in my nice little bureaucratic job.

Said that if it were a top five school the PhD would be worth doingotherwise not.

We started a family, left the city we both loved, moved away from our friends, and got a mortgage.

I was miserable. Transitions are hard.

But we went on to build something quite remarkabletogether.

For John, and discovering what our next chapter holds.