Growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. Building effective positioning is challenging today for firms facing new and stronger competition, volatile and uncertain markets, and shifting customer desires and demands. The 3-Circle Model facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing attention on the most critical strategy concepts in this uncertain environment. Growth strategy emerges in the model from systematically addressing four key strategy directives in a deep and disciplined way: define, build, and defend the unique value you create for customers; correct, eliminate, or reveal value that is failing customers or of which they’re not aware; potentially neutralize the unique value created for customers by competitors; explore and exploit new growth opportunities through deep understanding of customers’ unmet needs.
This book is based upon detailed research on the behavior and skills of successful negotiators. From this research, the book extracts Five Golden Rules along with simple tools and techniques which, if applied, guarantee a successful negotiation outcome. The book itself is based upon a fictional buyer- salesperson relationship. The book starts with the two protagonists meeting over lunch on the day the Buyer is due to retire. They begin to discuss their business relationship over the years and the book uses different episodes/meetings during that time to bring out the above Golden Rules and other negotiation concepts. The book provides simple tools to help apply the Golden Rules and each chapter concludes with a summary of the key points and questions to be considered.
The book highlights research undertaken by marketers, social researchers and anthropologists who have an interest in this field. Anti consumption is of relevance to practitioners and academics as it is important to understand consumer trends and values. The book has a particular relevance to professionals employed in marketing, retail and associated industries, who need to consider anti consumption as an influence on their target markets. The study of anti consumption can be seen as the ‘flip side’ to marketing which aims to understand promotion of consumption.
This book provides an overview of the organizational mechanisms of TMT impact. When having finished this book, readers will know how a TMT exerts influence and have more insight in how to make TMTs more effective in their organizations. Insight into the ways in which TMTs influence their organizations can benefit practicing top managers, as well as non-executive directors, consultants, team coaches etc. It may help them in establishing early indicators of organizational performance, selecting new TMT members, diagnosing dysfunctional TMT behavior, and assessing the TMT’s interaction with middle managers. Therefore, I expect this book to be interesting for a wide audience of practitioners and researchers.
“Want to generate more profits? Applying the 80/20 rule, Top Market Strategy lays out an easy-to-follow, research-based way to increase your profits.” —Ken Bernhardt, Taylor E. Little Professor of Marketing, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University Virtually every business seeks to increase its profit from customers, but few business executives realize that a universal principle governs their customer profitability. They may be applying the 80/20 rule to sales, quality control, investing, production, or other business functions without realizing that the 80:20 ratio actually summarizes the Pareto distribution of inputs to outputs. According to his equilibrium theory of relationships, stability is reached when inputs in the top 20% generate 80% of the outputs while inputs in the bottom 80% generate 20% of the outputs. Recently mathematicians confirmed that the Pareto distribution is as universal as the normal “bell-shaped” distribution, but is log linear and predicts results, rather than probabilities. Applying this universal principle to customer profitability, a typical business can predict that customers in the top 20% generate 80% of customer profitability (four times more profit than expected), whereas customers in the bottom 80% generate only 20% (one-fourth as much as expected). This means the 20% most profitable customers tend to be 16 times more profitable than the 80% least profitable customers. In order to capitalize on the Pareto principle, a business should 1. segment its customers by their profitability, 2. distinguish the top 20% of its customers in top market segment from the bottom 80% of the customers in the bottom market segment, and 3. target the top market segment with its marketing strategies. The purpose of this book is to show business students and executives how to implement this process and thereby achieve the predicted results.
This book will walk you through the five ingredients of transformation: The subject of organizational change is receiving increasing attention. Whether it is re-inventing government, re-engineering corporations, or reforming churches, all kinds of organizations are attempting major transformations. This book will “walk” you through our framework of the five ingredients of transformation: Burning Platform, why should you do anything; Vision, where are you going; Leadership, are you leading the effort, and do you have the skills necessary to lead; Technical Plan, how will you close the gap between the vision and the burning platform; Social Plan, how will you enroll others in the plan. At the end of reading this book, you will understand why change efforts fail, what ingredients are needed to ensure success, and what skills are needed at the organizational, group, and individual level to maximize improvement efforts.
Managers and analysts routinely collect and examine key performance measures to better understand their operations and make good decisions. Being able to render the complexity of operations data into a coherent account of significant events requires an understanding of how to work well with raw data and to make appropriate inferences.Managers and analysts routinely collect and examine key performance measures to better understand their operations and make good decisions. Being able to render the complexity of operations data into a coherent account of significant events requires an understanding of how to work well with raw data and to make appropriate inferences. Although some statistical techniques for analyzing data and making inferences are sophisticated and require specialized expertise, there are methods that are understandable and applicable by anyone with basic algebra skills and the support of a spreadsheet package. By applying these fundamental methods themselves rather than turning over both the data and the responsibility for analysis and interpretation to an expert, managers will develop a richer understanding and potentially gain better control over their environment. This text is intended to describe these fundamental statistical techniques to managers, data analysts, and students. Statistical analysis of sample data is enhanced by the use of computers. Spreadsheet software is well suited for the methods discussed in this text. Examples in the text apply Microsoft Excel. Readers will have access to the example workbooks and Adobe Flash videos illustrating key steps using Microsoft Excel from the Business Expert Press website.
This book explores how naturally connected organizations ( NCOs) can survive and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world using the principles of natural connectivity, organic growth and collaboration. It shows how naturally connected organizations are resilient through cycles of boom and bust. The book argues that the success of these organizations is in their design, and that they are the organizations of the 2lst century. They demonstrate that a natural way of running a global business can work. This book builds on earlier work on networks and contributes to the Organizational Design field of management study. Naturally connected organizations are associations of companies and/or individuals, which function via collaboration, communication and connectivity for a shared purpose. NCOs use organic organizing principles rather than control mechanisms’. Traditional organizations embrace mechanical metaphors, the results of which are engineered or re-engineered organizations based on command and control. NCOs are based on natural, organic metaphors.
As a business leader, you may be looking to the future, especially in troubling economic times, and wondering how to remain competitive in an era of scarce resources. Are your capital projects constrained and the idea of growing the workforce a distant dream? And like other savvy leaders, you are recognizing the potential of virtual business and more specifically, you may even be implementing a virtual business strategy to build a sustainable competitive advantage. If so, then you’ll need this book. This book combines academic theory with real world, practitioner success stories to provide executives a summary of current best practices. This book examines five virtual business strategies that are showing unprecedented opportunity. The Any Place, Any Time strategy focuses on providing high quality service 24/7 by ignoring traditional geographic challenges.
The book aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic and practical framework for readers who are interested or involved in developing a marketing plan so that they can appreciate various marketing concepts and put them together in an easy to read guide. Demanding and savvy customers along with a turbulent marketing environment, require marketers to be highly sensitive to the environmental monitoring systems capable of identifying the latest marketing trends and opportunities and threats at an early stage.The book aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic and practical framework for readers who are interested or involved in developing a marketing plan so that they can appreciate various marketing concepts and put them together in an easy to read guide. Demanding and savvy customers along with a turbulent marketing environment, require marketers to be highly sensitive to the environmental monitoring systems capable of identifying the latest marketing trends and opportunities and threats at an early stage. In response to these issues, the proposed manuscript covers the themes of planning, implementing and controlling marketing activities, which will provide guidance to marketers and non-marketer alike, in undertaking a marketing plan. The latest research findings in the marketing area are included. This book is written for marketing students and it is the intention of the authors to make this manuscript as basic, straightforward and to the point as possible. Business practitioners will also find this book useful.
