Product Description

Over the next decade, two out of every three companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition and facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today.

Unstoppable shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the "hidden assets" that can be the basis for tomorrow's growth.

Building on the author's previous books, Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, this book shows how any company in crisis can transform itself to become truly unstoppable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #390540 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Financial Times, May 4, 2007
Zook's latest work is ambitious, asks fundamental questions... [and is]
based on thorough analysis of a range of corporations

Financial Times, November 19, 2007
a crisp account of how firms make the most of "unknown knowns" - the assets they have left undeveloped

From the Author
Your previous books, Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, focused on
the search for sustainable and profitable growth. How does Unstoppable
compliment your earlier work?

In my earlier books, my research showed that companies often fail to
recognize the full potential for their core business and, as a result,
prematurely abandon it in the pursuit of hot markets or sexy new ideas -
only to realize their error - often, when it is too late. Those books
described a systematic way to assess a company's full potential and to make
sure executives didn't fall into these traps. But what happens when the
core comes under severe threat? How do you recognize the magnitude of that
threat before it is too late? How do you make sensible changes in the
fundamentals of your business to reignite a new wave of growth rather than
risk stalling or even worse? What do you do when it seems that your
success formula is starting to reach a limit sooner than expected. How to
make fundamental changes in your business model, while still running your
business, is what this book is about it. It is about how all businesses
ultimately approach a natural limit to their growth formulas, some that
demands changes in strategy or even in the core itself.

Some of the success stories you have written about describe companies that
built their renewal on finding their hidden assets. How do you define
hidden assets within an organization?

A hidden asset as I refer to it in UNSTOPPABLE, is something that you
possess whose value, properties, or potential you have not fully
appreciated or realized. The more complicated, large, or established your
company, the more likely it is that you possess numerous hidden assets,
some of which might contain unmined veins of business gold. In twenty-one
of our twenty-five case studies of successful strategic redefinition, a
hidden asset was the linchpin for the new strategy.

Can you give an example of a company that found value in their hidden
assets?

Marvel Entertainment is an example I use in the book of a company that
focused their renewal on their hidden assets. In 1996, Marvel was in
bankruptcy - it's core business of comic book heroes and stories had
flattened and consistent growth was no long occurring. But then Marvel got
new leadership: director Isaac Perlmutter and creative leader Avi Arad who
saw a way to change the company's strategy dramatically. They found their
hidden assets not in the actual comic books - but in the characters
themselves (more than 5,000 of them). They decided to work with film
studios to turn Marvel's popular characters into movie stars such as
Spider-Man, Wolverine, and the Incredible Hulk. And it worked. By 2005
revenues from character licensing for movies and merchandise accounted for
more than half of Marvel's revenue.

Customer Reviews

Pogo was right.

In two previously published books, Profit from the Core (2001) and then Beyond the Core (2004), Chris Zook shares what several years of extensive and intensive research revealed about "how companies fail to recognize the potential of their core business and, as a result, prematurely abandon it in pursuit of hot markets or sexy new ideas, only to realize their error - often, when it is too late." He suggests a systematic way for organizations to assess their full potential and to make certain, also, that they do not fall into "this common, and typically human, trap."

In this volume, Zook draws upon an even wider and deeper wealth of research sources that include about fifty interviews, mostly of CEOs. The title is explained by the fact that he and his associates chose to study most closely those companies "that beat the odds. We also analyzed patterns of failure and estimated the odds of success offered by various paths in various situations." He goes on to observe that all of the success stories built their renewal on their "hidden assets" that had been previously been undervalued, unrecognized, and/or underutilized. "These assets were not central to the strategy of the past, but they held the key to the future. Furthermore, the older and more complex the company, the greater was the likelihood of finding promising hidden assets." In other words, many companies already "hold most of the cards for "a winning hand" but do not realize it.

I highly recommend all three of Zook's books because, together, they answer three separate but related, and critically important questions:

1. How to define and grow an organization's core assets? (Profit from the Core)
2. How to expand its boundaries into new territory? (Beyond the Core)
3. How to redefine and renew its core? (Unstoppable)

No company is forever "unstoppable" but most (if not all) companies can take full advantage of the information and counsel Zook provides in this book to find correct answers to all three of these questions achieve core renewal without "leaps to distant and hot new markets, ...being the first adopter of a pioneering new strategy,...[or making] as `big bang' acquisition." In fact, unless a given organization has "beaten the odds" by sustaining profitable growth, it should first define or redefine its core assets and then grow or renew them, before committing any resources to organizational and/or territorial expansion.

Zook is to be commended on the care with which he defines various terms. For example, undervalued business platforms "that might have once been secondary in importance but now have the potential to be the foundation for a new major core business"(e.g. IBM's Global Services Group). Also unexploited customer assets that tend to exist in three primary forms: "knowledge gathered as part of serving the customer but that, over time, accumulates an inherently greater value of its own...a unique position of trust of relationship with a set of customers [that gives] much more access and influence than has been recognized (e.g. American Express and Harman International). And finally, underutilized capabilities ("the most difficult hidden asset to discern but no less powerful") that result in losses of position to competitors in terms of cost, speed, logistics, design, and quality of customer service (e.g. the United States Postal Service's inability to invest as much as FedEx and UPS in system upgrades). "At the root of such competitive reversals we often find a yawning capability gap that was undetected, dismissed, or ignored."

I especially appreciate Zook's skillful use of various reader-friendly devices such as check-lists that focus on key points covered within a chapter: "Seven Steps to Redefining Your Core" (pages 24-25), a "State of the Core Diagnostic" (Figure 2-3 on Page 44), "Detecting Undervalued Business Platforms" (Pages 82 and 83), "Identifying Hidden Customer Assets" (Page 115), "Defining Your Core Capabilities" (Page 140), and "Ten Principles of Core Growth and Redefinition" (Page158). These and other check-lists facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points later.

Although hidden assets are the "real key" to redefinition and capabilities are "the building blocks of renewal," and I agree with Zook that they are, it is important to keep in mind that transformation and renewal initiatives should never end. Zook asserts that "the real focus of business should be external - on competitors, shifts in technology, and customer dynamics." However, ironically, for many companies now searching for profitable growth, some "of their most challenging demons are internal" and their "most difficult foes" are often themselves. Unless they identify and then leverage the hidden assets they already have or to which they have easy access, they will either be out-of-business or acquired by another company within the next ten years.

Excellent, focussed and concise coverage of how to leverage the core assets of your business
This book gives you the tools and insights of how to look deep into your organisation to find undervalued, unrecognised or underutilized assets in the form of business platforms, customer insights and capabilities that can provide a new platform for sustainable growth.

I bought this book on the basis of previous reviews and certainly the comments made by reviewers are spot on. See the review by Robert Morris from Dallas Texas for example which provides good insight into the book and what it offers. I feel there is no need to cover the same ground that he has. However a short extract from the book is worth highlighing:

"This book is about what to do when you begin to fear that your success formula may be approaching its natural limit or seems to be losing momentum.the focus of the research underlying the book was to distil the lessons of companies around the world that set out to reinvigorate their businesses by making fundemental strategic changes.We set out to understand how businesses that seemed to be on an unsustainable path, and facing challenges that were becoming more difficult, reinvented their strategy, renewed their performance and at the same time continued to operate.How did these management teams identify a new course? Which methods were most useful in figuring it out? What are the repeatable success factors that can be applied in other businesses? How did these companies shift from one course to another?

The ten principles of of core growth and redefinition are to be found on page 158:

* Start by defining the core.
* Obsess on the full potential of the core.
* Fully value leadership economics.
* Map out adjacencies to the core.
* Recognise the power of repeatability in the core.
* When lost,return to the core customer.
* Remember the focus-expand-redefine cycle of growth.
* Exploit the power of hidden assets.
* Think of capabilities as the building blocks of renewal.
* Dont underestimate the power of focus.

This book follows on from two others by Chris Zook who is the head of Bain & Company's Global Strategy Practice and leads the Bain Growth Project.The research that sits behind the book is of a high quality and was gathered over 7 years. The book provides chapter summaries/checklists in a very readable 165 pages.

Stan Felstead Interchange-Resources UK

Spot on ..... so much goodness in just 165 pages!
Book three of a trilogy, but the only one I have read.
Published in 2007 and therefore very up-to-date with meaningful and current examples.
A heck of a lot of valid reference material drawn from his day job as Head of Global strategy with Bain & company - almost surprising just how many insights he has been allowed to reveal and pass on in this book!
The book focuses on what strategies you can employ when your core business strategy begins to run out of steam - and suggests that this will happen to more businesses on a shorter cycle than has historically been the case.
I found it to be as relevant and applicable to small business as to the major corporates that are cited in his examples.

The book is very readable.
Only six chapters, laid out well to give you an initial explanation, then a chapter on how to recognise when your business has a problem.
Then, three chapters on the main, most likely, proven most succesful, ways to redefine your core business:
Undervalued Business Platforms
Untapped Customer Insights
Underutilized Capabilities
Then, how to manage the growth cycle.

Plenty of juicy gems from his company's research; don't be tempted to move too far from your core business and back the next hot product or sexy sector - their research shows that most often this just ends in failure!

Plenty of soul searching question prompts - "If you do not know what you are really good at, it is tough to know what to do".

Understand your core customers - "we found that 80% of the best adjacency ideas in successful companies came from (or related to) the core customer".

"The best ideas come from drilling down into the core /.../ not from scanning the outside for big ideas."

Plenty of turned corners and marks in the margin, I know this is a book I will be referring back to.

If you're looking for reinvention and growth, if your future profit looks like shrinking or shifting, if your core is under threat, if growth has stalled, if your differential is threatened, give this book a read!