Stratevolve

Strategy in Practice

Strategy in Practice is designed to help experienced managers who are involved in, or who will be involved in, trying to debate their firm’s strategy. The emphasis is on trying to answer some fundamental questions about the firm’s future direction. In addressing these questions, some analytical techniques and frameworks are explained. The emphasis is on the quality of the strategy debate, and the concepts explained are “tools for thought”.

All the tools explained in the book have been developed and used with top executive teams – they have been demonstrated to be useful in helping managers to think strategically. The book is structured to help answer the following questions: What markets should we be trying to compete in? How should we try to compete in these segments? What key competencies do we need to build to realise this competitive strategy? What do we look like now? How can we move forward?

Creating Market Insight

Creating Market Insight addresses the key strategic issue facing any company: How do we make sense of our market and find those precious nuggets of knowledge that lead to real competitive advantage?

Creating Market Insight explains how firms tailor their market scanning behaviour to work well in the special conditions of their market; describes the process through which data is translated first into information, and then knowledge; differentiates routine market knowledge from true insight and details how firms turn insight into value; and, provides a detailed, step-by-step process that enables the reader to emulate the success of insightful firms. Creating Market Insight is written for managers who need to create value in the real world.

The Essence of Competitive Strategy

Within the field of strategic management, competitive strategy is concerned with the core issues of where and how to compete. The book is concerned with strategy at the individual business unit (or SBU) level.

It asks the following questions: Where should we compete? What products should we compete with? How will we gain sustainable competitive advantage in these chosen markets?

It focuses on these issues and provides a unique framework for developing viable competitive strategies using two interrelated matrices: the customer matrix and the producer matrix.

Designing World Class Corporate Strategies: Value Creating Roles for Corporate Centres

Designing World Class Corporate Strategies considers the key role of corporate centres within the very large, primarily multi-business organisations. At present, these corporate centres are under attack as not creating value and merely adding cost to their groups.

The authors have developed a corporate configurations model which demonstrates four ways in which corporate centres can add significant value. However this requires the centre to act in specific ways depending on the external environment in which the group is operating.