Creating Valuable Business Strategies

Book excerpt: Creating Valuable Business Strategies will change existing mindsets about strategy. Here is an answer for the strategist who asks, 'What should I do differently next Monday morning?'. The object of strategy is to create financial value and the offering-centred approach of Creating Valuable Business Strategies provides a novel and pragmatic framework for setting strategic direction: choosing which markets to contest and how. This book: * Identifies the individual offering as the fundamental unit of strategy--the choices that customers make regarding individual offerings are at the root of a company's financial success. * Provides an innovative and comprehensive approach to profitable business strategy--designing each offering and also the collection as a whole. * Explains that strategy is a task for all businesses with offerings, even the smallest, not just the giants. The book first sets the scene and makes the case that each value-adding offering needs a competitive strategy: it must have a winning competitive position and use one or more winning resources. It provides the reader with a rich classification of how an offering can be competitively positioned vis-à-vis rival offerings and customers. Winning resources and why offerings need them is discussed next. Corporate strategy, i.e. the managing of the company's whole collection of offerings is then examined. This is followed by a discussion of the implications for organizing and structuring for an offering-centred approach to strategy. Finally all the aspects of this new framework that may meet with resistance are explored. Creating Valuable Business Strategies is essential reading for anyone who is involved in designing tomorrow's offerings: from the backroom specialist to the CEO. It has a clear logical presentation with a focus on practical implementation.