Companies that purposefully set out to excel are remarkably few and far between.
The number of those who have a strong, well-thought out strategy for success are even fewer.
Based on five years of research and field-testing, Breakout Strategy gives you a “fast track” strategic vision that can push your company to incredible new rates of growth and expansion. Strategy and leadership experts Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey, and Thomas Lawton show how to craft a strategy that fits your business, whether you're a small start-up or an established national or international company. They also give you the tools to adapt that strategy as you grow and expand. Their system features five key initiatives:
Create a workable vision by understanding the needs and aspirations of a company
Face customers with a value proposition that covers all the important bases
Align what a business does with what the customer truly desires
Balance the people and process sides of business to deliver on promises
Liberate the energies of any strategy's toughest critic-those who work within the business
Breakout Strategy puts these initiatives in context by examining how diverse companies achieved breakout growth, including jetBlue, Harley Davidson, and Starbucks. It also sheds light on how a poor strategy can topple a once-successful company off the pedestal of market dominance, such as Krispy Kreme's overly ambitious expansion strategy that stretched the company and the brand too thin.
With the systematic approach in Breakout Strategy, you'll be able to travel the fast track to market triumph, leaving your competitors struggling to catch up.
BREAKOUT: A forceful emergence from a restrictive form or position.
STRATEGY: The means by which leaders create and take control of the future.
Google. Starbucks. IKEA. jetBlue. Netflix. Samsung. You know their names because they have been some of the biggest breakout companies in the past decade. Armed with five years of research and field-testing, Breakout Strategy shows you the path to that tipping point-where strategy, execution, and sheer demand meet to form explosive and unstoppable business growth.
“Breakout Strategy is bursting with fresh ideas. It reveals how strategy-well conceived and implemented-is the spearhead for value creation and sustained high growth.”-Paul Bateman, CEO, JPMorgan Asset Management
“Breakout Strategy is a wide-ranging and global perspective on the paths which managers can take to achieve double-digit growth which is strongly rooted in a creative use of recent business history.”-Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School
“At a time when many established companies seem trapped in low growth, Finkelstein, Harvey, and Lawton offer managers a practical handbook for breaking out of conventional boundaries.”-Richard Whittington, Professor of Strategic Management, Said Business School, Oxford University
“With over 100 current and relevant examples of young and old, heavy and light organizations, the authors have managed to deliver and reinforce the most important messages for business leaders regarding strategy. Breakout Strategy is a refreshing and energizing read.”-Conor McCarthy, Director and Cofounder, AirAsia
About the Author
Sydney Finkelstein is the author of Why Smart Executives Fail, and professor of strategy and leadership at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Finkelstein holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Columbia University. He has worked with major global companies including Boeing, Deutsche Bank, and GE.
Charles Harvey is professor of business history and management, and dean of Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Harvey holds a BSc and PhD from the University of Bristol. He has worked with companies such as JP Morgan, Bombardier Transportation, and J Sainsbury.
Thomas Lawton is associate professor of strategic management at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. Lawton holds degrees from University College Cork and the London School of Economics and a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence. He has worked with IATA, IBM, and JP Morgan, among others.
Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Leadership and Strategy. He teaches executive education at the Tuck School (where he serves as the Faculty Director of the flagship Tuck Executive Program), and also has experience working with executives at Northwestern, Wharton, Duke, Bocconi, London Business School, Australian Graduate School of Management, Melbourne Business School, Hanoi School of Business, the Chalmers School (Sweden) and the Helsinki School of Economics. He holds degrees from Concordia University and the London School of Economics, as well as a Ph.D. from Columbia University in strategic management.
Professor Finkelstein has published 15 books and over 70 articles, with several bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller in the U.S. and Japan, Why Smart Executives Fail (www.whysmartexecutivesfail.com). Based on a six-year study of 51 companies and 200 interviews of business leaders, the book identifies the fundamental reasons why major mistakes happen, points out the early warning signals that are critical for investors and managers alike, and offers ideas on how organizations can develop a capability of learning from corporate mistakes. On Fortune Magazine's list of Best Business Books, the Wall Street Journal called it "a marvel - a jargon-free business book based on serious research that offers genuine insights with clarity and sometimes even wit ... It should be required reading not just for executives but for investors as well." It has also been featured in such media as the Financial Times, Business Week, the London Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Fast Company, Across the Board, and Entrepreneurship, among others, and has been translated into 11 different languages. In Professor Finkelstein's follow-up book, Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You (Harvard Business Press) (www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/thinkagain), published in 2009, he turns his attention to such major strategic decisions as the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous business cases to explain why decision-makers sometimes think they're right when they are really wrong. The book takes up recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and management to not only document why things go wrong, but also to offer a series of solutions that reduce our vulnerability to falling into the traps that lead to bad decisions.
Professor Finkelstein has had three books nominated for the Academy of Management's Terry Book Award, the most prestigious such honor in the field. His other awards include Finalist for the Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Award (2004), the McKinsey & Company Strategic Management Society Best Conference Paper Prize Honorable Mention (2002), the Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management Executive for his article "Leveraging Intellect" (1997), two Citations of Excellence from ANBAR, the world's leading guide to management journal literature (1997 & 1998), the Cenafoni Prize for research in Entrepreneurial Strategy (1991), and finalist for the A.T. Kearney award for the best research in strategic management (1988). He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management.
Professor Finkelstein is listed in the "World's Top 25 Leadership Gurus." He has participated on numerous CEO forums, been interviewed or had his work appear in numerous leading media outlets, and served as consultant and speaker for major companies around the world, including Aetna, American Express, Bank of Montreal, Barclays, Boeing, Cerberus, Chevron, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo, , ING, ITT, J&J, JP Morgan Chase, Mayo Clinic, Korn-Ferry, McGraw-Hill, McKinsey, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley, Novartis, PwC, Raytheon, Roche, Russell Reynolds, and UBS.
To stay up-to-date on Professor Finkelstein's latest insights on leadership and decision-making, follow him on Twitter @sydfinkelstein.
This review is from: Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-Digit Growth (Hardcover)
"Breakout Strategy" is a sophisticated handbook on business strategy that provides a clear framework for what has worked in the past and why it has. Success depends upon your ability to "break out" out of the status quo, take action, and stand apart from others.
Through rich examples culled from a deep understanding of business history, Finkelstein, Harvey, and Lawton take you through both the winners and the losers and identify why they won or lost. These examples form clear archetypes which, when placed in an easy-to-understand framework, turn the book into a useful business tool. You can just mirror the patterns set by those successful who have gone before and broken away in their fields.--to take your business to the next level.
Few stones are left unturned when it comes to a frank look at business. For me, the most interesting section was "Breakout Leadership" where the authors suggest leaders face up to "negative capabilities." They describe leaders who try to put such a good face on everything that they end up stifling debate, change, and eventually growth and survival. I have personally seen examples of unbridled optimism among an executive team that truly created the "culture of silence" the authors describe--with the inevitable negative consequences for the business. As they say, "There is a fine line between appropriate confidence and over-the-top arrogance, and the best breakout leaders understand that they can't cross that line."
This is an eloquently written book for the erudite business person--a useful handbook which you can refer to again and again to practice and perfect your business strategy. Breakout out of what you are doing right now and get this book!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
breakout leaders, big improvers, breakout companies, deep customer focus, socio system, breakout strategy, expanding market space, breakout company, daily disposable lenses, breakout strategies, techno systems, laggard companies, strategic breakout, breakout types, boundary breakers, positive capabilities, compelling value proposition, relational capabilities, new market space, conceptual capabilities, new value proposition, emergent markets, early adapters, wave riders, shifting shape
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Best Western, Rio Tinto, United Kingdom, Bankers Trust, Krispy Kreme, Aer Lingus, New York, Rockwell Collins, Boston Beer, Jim Koch, Mittal Steel, Red Sox, Bob Ayling, Samsung Electronics, The Body Shop, Business Week, Charles Harvey, Clay Jones, Direct Line, General Electric, New Labour, North America, Peter Orton, Southwest Airlines
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