Product Description

This book outlines a straightforward method any company can use to analyze and continually improve their business model - the most important determinant of success in today's hyper-competitive business environment. Successful companies make fundamental improvements in their business models every two to four years, while unsuccessful companies waste their efforts trying to make obsolete models work. "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" draws on the experiences of these successful companies to offer step-by-step guidance in establishing continuous business model innovation as a fundamental corporate process.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #504885 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 334 pages

Synopsis
This book outlines a straightforward method any company can use to analyze and continually improve their business model - the most important determinant of success in today's hyper-competitive business environment. Successful companies make fundamental improvements in their business models every two to four years, while unsuccessful companies waste their efforts trying to make obsolete models work. "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" draws on the experiences of these successful companies to offer step-by-step guidance in establishing continuous business model innovation as a fundamental corporate process.

From the Author
Centuries pass from the time an important idea is first expressed to its widespread implementation. For example, universal literacy and education were advocated after the printing press was invented. Their broadscale application did not begin until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even today, these basics are not observed in all countries. Businesses didn't begin to study how to systematically improve until the twentieth century. Today, most ways to improve are ignored in more businesses than they are used. That's because a business can focus on only a few things. You need simpler, more effective ways to improve.

The most fundamental concept of progress is that of continual learning. Yet business has been slow to pick up on that concept, and applies it sporadically. Most organizations only look to learn how to do better what they did poorly yesterday that isn't very important tomorrow. For example, endless studies will go into fine-tuning a mass production line, when the company really needs to learn how to make better, customized products inexpensively. That's like stooping to pick up a penny while a hundred dollar bill rolls by unnoticed. Instead, you need to work on what will help you and your stakeholders the most -- continually improving their business models, finding ways to be better prepared for unexpected future events and enhancing their highest potential performance areas. Most companies totally ignore these three areas. It's no wonder that so many companies briefly prosper before withering.

Our purpose in writing this book, and others in this series, is to redirect the perception of what must be done to lead and operate a successful business or organization. We believe that you and your colleagues have the knowledge and skills to achieve vastly more. You have observed how to accomplish everything you need to do in some other area of your life, but have not yet applied those observations to the most important areas of your business. You, your organization and your stakeholders (including but limited to customers, end users, employees, partners, suppliers, distributors, lenders, shareholders, the communities in which you operate and the parts of society that you impact) simply need to apply your knowledge and those skills in new ways and more often. New questions raised in this book will help shift your focus into more productive directions.

The Ultimate Competitive Advantage is the third volume in Mitchell and Company's library of business books designed to improve organizational performance. Like the prior two books, The 2,000 Percent Solution (AMACOM, 1999) and The Irresistible Growth Enterprise (Stylus, 2000), this volume can be understood and employed independently. At the same time, the skills and perspectives developed in each volume are also designed to be complementary.

Beginning in 1992 and continuing through 2002, we sought to find the simplest, most effective management methods that the most successful companies used since 1992 to continually outperform competitors. We hoped to find these methods by tracking and studying top performing companies while they thought of and made the changes that created these competitive achievements. That kind of real-time measurement and study of creating competitive advantages across many different industries has never been done before.

Prior strategic studies have attempted to look backward at the causes of today's success in earlier periods and then tried to describe all of the elements of creating that best performance after the fact. In such backward looks, cause and effect can easily be confused in the process since many changes are only coincidentally associated with each other. Afterwards, memories fade and those who tell their stories may be more interested in enhancing their roles than in accurately describing what worked and what didn't.

Those prior approaches also unintentionally missed two critical points. First, management effectiveness in outperforming competitors reached a higher level in the 1990s than had been seen before through a new managment practice, continuing business model innovation. As a result, studying what people did prior to the 1990s is of limited usefulness in understanding the current gold standard in creating and improving lasting competitive advantages. Second, the management process behind improving performance across many aspects of a company was often kept secret during the 1990s and since then by those who practiced continuing business model innovation. Only if you looked in the right places while this innovation was going on could you find how this practice was flourishing.

As a result of these unintended limitations of prior published strategic studies, much of what you have learned about creating competitive advantages is of less value now compared to what you are about to read about the state-of-the-art and potential of continual business model innovation.

The message of The Ultimate Competitive Advantage is to develop and implement a superior strategy that continually improves an organization's business model -- its ways of serving customers and outperforming competitors, as well as fairly rewarding all stakeholders. This book is designed to help you plan, start and invest in new businesses; turn start-ups into seasoned operations; turnaround problem businesses; move from a weak position to industry leadership; and build from industry leadership into expanding the scope, growth and profitability of the industry. Most of the companies described in this book were start-ups under the current CEO within the past twenty-five years. Students and young people developing business careers can learn important leadership and management principles and responsibilities from the many examples we present between these covers. Readers will benefit by employing the strategic management process described in the book. Specific questions about your business at the end of each chapter and examples may stimulate useful thinking and help inspire progress.

Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles, Boston, 2003

About the Author
Donald Mitchell is CEO and chairman of Mitchell and Company, a financial and strategy consulting firm working with the most senior officers at hundreds of major companies including Black & Decker, Procter & Gamble, Charles Schwab, Southwest Airlines, Time Warner and Xerox. Carol Coles is COO and president of Mitchell and Company, and co-founded the firm. She has an extensive practice in strategy development and stock-price improvement.

Customer Reviews

...the perennial gale of creative destruction
Mitchell and Coles have done businesses a tremendous service in writing this excellent book. They have done so by providing a practical toolbox of ideas with which to stimulate entrepreneurs, business leaders and managers to enhance and improve their business prospects in today's very competitive marketplaces.

I must admit to having struggled with this book for a long time. Not because of difficulty in reading and understanding. To be sure this is a very lucid and comprehensible book and is accessible to all levels from a twelve year old bringing out his lemonade stall for the third year in a row and adding iced tea to his product range to the CEO of a major corporation.

My struggle was with trying to make overarching sense of what lessons the authors were trying to encourage readers to learn. It became clear to me after several periods of reflection upon completion of the text. The crucial significance of this book in a practical way lies in understanding how deep into national economic systems the process of globalisation has seeped. We see the reults in our everyday lives, how quickly new or improved products come into the marketplace. We see how quickly established businesses change or die, we see cheaper and better products come from remote parts of the world leaving us a greater part of our disposable income to spend on the things we would prefer to spend on them.

It is clear that in life and not just in business the process of change has quickened and that as individuals we must be more adaptable and more attune to the world around us to the opportunities that exist. It is as if we need to become our own business in ourselves.

Mitchell and Coles focus on but one part of this continuous change and that is on the business model. Their strong focus on this area has great strength but we must also learn the broader lesson from their well researched work. To survive in today's world we must not only accept change but we must embrace it as people, as workers, as entrepreneurs. It is as Schumpeter pointed out inherent in the nature of capitalism. But, to be sure it is inherent in the nature of all life, as Hayek observed. We must change or die.

I would heartily recommend this book to everyone, for there is much to be gained from within it's pages. Mitchell and Coles have produced an excellent book which far and away exceeds it's remit as a business book

Add Value and Decrease Cost at the Same Time
Donald Mitchell is chairman and chief executive officer of Mitchell and Company - a management consulting firm specialized in business strategy. Carol Coles is cofounder, president and chief operating officer of Mitchell and Company. Ms. Coles has spent more than twenty years designing management processes to help companies develop the strategic potential of their business.

By reading The Ultimate Competitive Advantage, a business leader can learn how to establish a continually improving process for successful business model innovation. The book will provide plenty of practical advice - for small start up companies as well for larger well established companies.

The main claim of this practical book is that having the best management process in your industry is the one thing that can most improve a company's growth and profitability.

Mitchell and Coles support this claim that the most fundamental concept of progress is continual learning and improving. It is the first book describing best practices in continual business model innovation.

As an MBA student I learned that a continual improvement process for the company's business model will play an important role for a future business leader. For me personally, the main strength of this book is that I could learn how to design a superior business process that would add value and decrease costs at the same time.

I strongly recommend this practical book to students and experienced managers. The specific question about your business at the end of each chapter will inspire your own thinking and learning processes.

The key to continuously increasing your business success
Since the Internet Hype came along, most of the talk has been about discovering the “next new thing”, creating a great mind shifting business model. While Don & Carol’s book is also about Business models, their approach is shows more emotional intelligence. Rather than trying to come up with a revolutionary idea, and then figure out how one get the world to adopt that new idea, they recommend to go for a continuous improvement type of approach. Part of their message boils down to having more empathy for your customers by listening to what their needs are and then adapting yourself accordingly.
Given statistics indicate that only 10% of the population are of the “revolutionary type” (called “early adopters” in marketing) while 65% of the population is more of the “gradual evolution” type of person, their approach probably makes more sense to most people around. The authors probably have come to this conclusion from their 25+ years as strategy consultants, but if one looks at the demise of the dot.com period and at the continuing success of products from the far east, there is lots of evidence to support this point of view.
The basic question of the book is “how can your company simultaneously improve costs, adjust prices and provide new benefits in a move to increase the value (or ROI) your product or services represent. As some other reviewers pointed out, in the past Porter, Drucker, etc have offered theories to answer this question, but this book is far more practical.
The authors give you loads of questions to get you started to think in a more innovative, improvement oriented way about the things you are already doing. For those of us who claim don’t have time, the formatting of the book helps you to pick out thought-provoking questions easily: they are presented in boxes throughout the text and summarized in “key questions” sections at the end of each chapter.
After reading this book, few excuses are left for not starting to continuously regenerate your business model.