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Informationen zum Autor Jeffrey R. Williams is professor of strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University Business School, where he is the school's highest-rated speaker and faculty advisor to the school's executive programs. His article "How Sustainable Is Your Competitive Advantage?" won California Management Review's Pacific Telesis Award for improving the practice of management. Some of his consulting clients include IBM, AT&T, National Semiconductor, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Mellon Bank, Holiday Corporation, and Robert Bosch GmbH. Klappentext The task of continuously renewing a company is the greatest challenge confronting any chief executive. To enable managers to project renewal strategies likely to win in the future, Jeffrey Williams has constructed a dynamic road map of outcomes in what he calls "economic time," based on a ten-year study of growth, decline, and renewal patterns of hundreds of companies in forty-five industries. In this superbly readable book, Williams's revolutionary, award-winning concept of slow-, standard-, and fast-cycle economic time provides a unifying business language that the multicycle manager can use to compare the renewal opportunities of widely diverse products, companies, and markets.Using examples and studies from companies such as Starbucks, McDonald's, UPS, Compaq, Sony, Merck, Disney, Toyota, IKEA, Microsoft, Sony, Intel, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Chrysler, and Hewlett-Packard, Williams explains that the key idea in economic time is being able to manage products and organizations according to the speed and means by which economic value arises, decays, and is renewed. The drivers of economic time are isolating mechanisms -- a firm's unique capabilities that lie at the heart of its competitive advantage -- and that, in Williams's framework, "delay" product obsolescence. Building on his intuitively appealing model, Williams describes how his three laws of renewal -- convergence, alignment, and renewal -- provide guidelines by which managers can gain command over strategy in complex, dynamic competitive situations.Renewable Advantage is not only essential reading but also will become a standard reference for senior and division managers, business scientists and strategists, and general managers in all industries. CHAPTER 1: THE ADVENT OF ECONOMIC TIME The central idea of this book is economic time. When we think of the effects of time on a business, we imagine that markets are speeding up and that advantage is short-lived. But business time is becoming more complex than that. Time is not what you think. The significance of time in business goes beyond the reality that markets and companies are moving faster. There is a more interesting force at work. Business time is not only speeding up -- business time is splitting markets apart, as well as the companies that compete in them. Do we really think dynamically? Most of us don't. We are conditioned from birth to regard change with caution, even as we grow and explore the world around us. When we ask managers whether they think dynamically, we hear answers that range from a confident "of course we do!" to a perplexed "what do you mean?" Ask yourself these basic questions: What makes you special, different from all of your competitors? What is your organization ultimately capable of when stretched? What will you never be able to do, no matter how hard you try? What role is left for your corporate headquarters? Or should you leave your diverse businesses alone to run themselves? As simple as these questions are, they get at the heart of modern business problems. The business opportunities in the new economy are complex and dynamic. Some are different. Other time-honored rules remain little changed. Facing this complexity, failure to equip yourself to think in terms of multispeed competition -- what we call economic time -- can reduce your effectiveness to that of a ho...
