The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

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		The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business
		The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

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.

媒体推荐

“Business leaders should ‘have a good look’ at Rita McGrath's new book about the importance of a flexible and dynamic business model.” — Entrepreneur magazine (entrepreneur.com)

“Unlocking the secrets of competitiveness… In her new book, McGrath debunks the notion of sustainable competitive advantage. It no longer has relevance she says, and instead organizations now need to find ways of leveraging temporary advantages to remain fluid and innovative enough to change tack when those advantages no longer remain.” — Decision

“There are a number of valuable lessons in The End of Competitive Advantage that IT leaders can heed and inculcate. It also stands as a challenge for them to shed old, reactionary ways of doing business, and instead assume strategies that differentiate their organizations as innovative thought centers.” —CIO Digest

“intriguing look at the future” — BizEd magazine

“The End of Competitive Advantage is one of the best business strategy books in recent years. It is readable, well organised and capable of delivering observations that can be absorbed the next strategy meeting. But beyond that it rather importantly updates our assumptions about what will and won't work in that ‘fast moving world.” — Engineering and Technology Magazine

“The End of Competitive Advantage fits beautifully into the ongoing discussion about what defines successful companies today, and what will continue to in the future.” — 800 CEO READ

“The book is well written, well argued, assumes knowledge on the part of the reader without sliding into either corporate speak or the long words of academia, and the argument hard to refute... More importantly, the solutions offered here are immediately actionable.” — Business Traveller (businesstraveller.com)

ADVANCE PRAISE for The End of Competitive Advantage:

Francisco D’Souza, CEO, Cognizant—
“If competitive advantage was ever sustainable, that time has passed. McGrath’s 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.”

William D. Green, former Chairman, Accenture—
“This smart, readable book addresses today’s 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.”

Sanjay Purohit, Senior Vice President, Infosys Ltd.—
“The urge to hold on to one’s 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.”

Nancy McKinstry, CEO and Chairman, Executive Board, Wolters Kluwer nv—
“McGrath’s groundbreaking work is aptly timed for today’s dynamic markets, where winning requires continuous reconfiguration.”

Klaus C. Kleinfeld, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa—
“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.”

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

网友对The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business的评论

A reader of McGrath's "Discovery Driven Growth" I was a bit disappointed with this book. There are thought nuggets and some concepts worth considering but it does lack the depth and practicality of her previous book.

Building the case on data from public companies, the main notion that "sustainable competitive advantage" is increasingly irrelevant and organizations must adapt to quickly changing environments with a more flexible growth strategy seems pretty accurate. Except for a few industries driven by government / long term needs (e.g. defense), we can all see and experience in corporate life the growing need for agility. The question is how do you best achieve this?

One of the traditional answers is innovation. For those familiar with the field of innovation and innovation best practices, the "Building an Innovation Proficiency" chapter doesn't offer anything new.

The chapters "Continuous Reconfiguration", "Healthy Disengagement" and "Using Resource Allocation to Promote Deftness" are worth the read. This is where I would have liked more meat and practical tools.

The book ends with a chapter on the personal / career implications of Transient Advantage with a pretty shameless plug in for executive programs offered by business schools and Mrs. McGrath's Columbia in particular...

Less of a "how to" than "how to approach", McGrath's book is compelling nonetheless for how it highlights the fragility of forward-thinking ideas and the pressing need for discipline and process. Having led or been part of disruptive IT initiatives in several large organizations, I've seen those that fail, do so for much the same reasons, which McGrath highlights repeatedly:

First, "Innovation is not a sideline ... [or] a senior executive hobby or a passing fad. Innovation is a competency that needs to be professionally built and managed." [ch 5] In reality, half of what passes for innovation is because some senior executive has got all worked up over a book he or she has read, and suddenly, innovation is everyone's priority. Typically that lasts a few months, amid widespread feelings of "we've seen this before."

Second, "Often, the people who see changes coming are not those in charge of making major organizational decisions. ... Often, also, the people who are in positions to make difficult choices face the prospect of personal and career catastrophe if the predictions turn out to be false." [ch 6]

Finally, forward-thinking ideas are easily quashed. They get torpedoed again and again by entrenched interests out of sheer spite, for no reason save that political agendas were not adequately served. Never mind that entire lines of business are at stake.

In companies facing erosion of long-held advantages and reluctant to let go cherished assumptions, working "within the system" to integrate deliberate innovation and disruption is a sound approach to ensure it is done reliably *and* repeatably. McGrath provides many examples of companies who have done that.

The great strength of this book is not that it dissects the root causes of why the traditional sources of competitive advantage have eroded in many industries or why the classic Michael Porter model for strategy formulation has outlived its usefulness. It doesn't. Instead,McGrath more or less asserts her premisses without dwelling on them. What it does do in a very well organized and easy to read fashion is provide a useful set of ideas for managing in a world of rapid and discontinuous change."Innovation" is widely viewed as a magic bullet for business and even national growth but few established firms can innovate beyond continuous improvement, if at all. The key challenge is that firms are all about stability and continuity and by their very nature highly political and inward focused bureaucracies where power (and rewards) depend on the control of resources and information. This makes it hard to disengage (a key concept here) from declining opportunities until too late and equally hard to convince key constituencies to take risks that might not pay off. But with some guts it can be done as McGrath illustrates in ten crisp case studies across diverse industries and geographies. Based on experience, not all successful, working with companies facing disruptive change she lays out key principles of what works and what doesn't without minimizing the difficulties. It is a quick read and well worth your attention.

From the many global cases discussed (one of them is my former employer), it is clear that transient advantage is increasingly used to achieve business growth and success. Professor McGrath not only shares transient principles with LEADERS, but -- importantly -- provides information that can help EMPLOYEES to prepare for successful careers in organizations that use transient principles.

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