BOOK OF THE MONTH

The Essential Advantage: How to Win With a Capabilities-Driven Strategy

By Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi

Product Description

Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage, Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with coherence: a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.

Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its
chosen markets.

Based on extensive research and filled with company examples--including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble--Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes. The authors reveal:

• Why you should focus on a system of a few
  aligned capabilities

• How to identify the "way to play" in your market

• How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system

• How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and
  people decisions

Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
  (December 9, 2010)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 1422136515

• ISBN-13: 978-1422136515

• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches

This book is available from all major booksellers including Amazon.com, Harvard Business Books, Barnes & Noble and more.