Unique value

de Andrea Dunham, Barry Marcus, Mark Stevens, Patrick Barwise

This book is about why businesses succeed...and fail. For the first time, in clear, unequivocal language, the fundamentals of strategy are explained in a manner that offers a blueprint for business success. Drawing on a wealth of current real-world examples, it deals with the root causes of both the successes and the failures of today's large business enterprises - the multinational corporations whose millions of employees, contractors and suppliers make up a large part of the work force in developed economies. It explains how large corporations in trouble brought disaster upon themselves by failing to manage their businesses in accordance with the fundamentals of strategy. Unique Value is global in scope. It incorporates in-depth interviews with today's most successful strategists at industry leaders such as AT&T, Deutsche Bank, Fuji-Xerox, General Electric, Guinness, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pepsico, Revlon, Sara Lee, Time Warner, Unilever and many more, covering strategy and implementation at its most current and dynamic. Unique Value dissects the reasons for IBM's failure to transform itself from a mainframe and hardware business into a modern leader in technology; General Motors' failure to maintain its dominance in automobiles; and European and Japanese failures such as Nixdorf Computers and Sony Betamax - all in the context of the fundamentals of business strategy. The common theme in cases of avoidable business failure is the lack of a framework for evolving strategy in response to changing customer, manufacturing, distribution, technology and competitive realities. This book supplies a detailed description of strategic fundamentals and provides a process for strategy evolution. But it goes further, making a distinction between what too often passes for strategy and the superior strategies that build the world's greatest business enterprises. These Unique Value strategies leverage a unique set of business strengths in a way that gives a corporation a clear competitive advantage and a far greater return on its investments. By taking the mystery out of strategy, Unique Value: The Secret of All Great Business Strategies empowers individuals to become strategists who can make a significant contribution to their own business's success.