The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy [Hardcover]

Arnoldo C. Hax (Author), Dean L. Wilde (Author), Dr. Lester Thurow (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2001

Drawing from the authors' work with companies such as Coca-Cola, Motorola, 3M, General Motors, and Unilever, The Delta Project provides a unique model through which to develop strategy in the new economy. Arnoldo Hax and Dean Wilde examine how globalization, deregulation and the emergence of the internet infrastructure have changed the rules for success and identify three distinct strategic positions that can be used to realign the direction of your business. Introducing new models of "bonding", "complementors" and "customer lock-in" this book provides a fundamental shift in the way we think about competitive positioning.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

MIT professor Hax and consultant Wilde aim to show how to squeeze more profits and greater efficiency out of an organization. Building off the work of Michael Porter, C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, they argue that the best way to gain competitive advantage is to bond with customers rather than to beat out the opposition. While they sketch out useful approaches, most management theory readers will recognize their approach as only an incremental advance in conventional wisdom.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hax is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a consultant at Dean & Company, a strategy consulting and investing firm founded and headed by Wilde. From their work with clients, the pair has concluded that today's new forms of networks (digital, physical, and economic) have made existing frameworks for business strategy outmoded. Previous strategic models have focused on rivalry; the Delta model conceived by Hax and Wilde is based on bonding, as companies forge new relationships with customers, suppliers, competitors, substitutes, and complementors. The authors describe competition based upon product, customer, and system economics--the three distinct strategic options of the Delta model's "Triangle." They contrast these options with those afforded by earlier models and detail the eight ways for implementing them. They show how Motorola is using the Delta model as "the driving intellectual force behind [its] strategic repositioning," identify three separate "Adaptive Processes" for linking execution with strategy, and analyze the Internet industry using the Delta model. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (September 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312240465
• ISBN-13: 978-0312240462
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,028,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise visualization of strategy in the netwoked world., January 7, 2002

By 

Michael Wm. Denis (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy (Hardcover)

The result of several years of analysis and contribution from some of the world's leading CEOs (in addition to Hax and Wilde), the Delta Project very succinctly creates a visual representation for strategy development that is both descriptive and normative. It explains the "Bonding" principle as a primary strategic force in both SRM (Supplier Relationship Management - including complementors) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It shows strategy as a spectrum from "Best Product" to "Total Customer Solution" to "System Lock-In" and the multiple paths and various methods to achieve each end point.
This book explains the need for process design from the start (e.g. Six Sigma), management by measurement, the failure of averages (a mean without a STD DEV is a meaningless number), and the difference in High Level and Granular metrics (what my Firm would call Critical Success Factors vs. Key Performance Indicators).
Most importantly, it drives home the most critical aspect of a winning corporate/industry/market strategy - operationalization, "Execution is NOT the problem, aligning execution to Strategy is!" I see this every day in my own client consulting. This is not a MBA textbook it is a practical, quick and succinct read.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterful lesson, May 15, 2007

By 

S. Andrivet - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy (Hardcover)

The Delta Model is a recent framework, developed at MIT by A. Hax and a variety of co-authors, to develop more efficient strategies. The core book explaining this approach is The Delta Project, has been released in 2000. Work has continued on the subject, often with Hax's Sloan Fellows students.

The Delta approach goes beyond the two dominant approaches to strategy (the famous Porterian five-force model, and the less widespread enterprise competencies/resources model) and gives company strategists the tools to broaden their vision. Among the strong points of this approach, one might mention:

* A far greater attention given to the "ecology" of complementors existing around the firm, and the extended company
* A much more precise definition of customers (encompassing all the steps up to, and including, the final customer), and very strong emphasis on exquisite segmentation
* A strong focus on the notion of "customer bonding" that partially supersedes raw competitive advantage
* A rigorous emphasis on execution, and how to measure and pilot the execution of strategy
* A clear rejection of the notion of commoditized product, and the formulation of new strategic stances going beyond "best price" or "pertinent differentiation" to include customer integration and system lock-in. Those new dimensions are organized along a figure infamous among Hax students, the Delta triangle.
* A focus on customer needs -especially untapped ones - as opposed to benchmarking oneself against competitors

14 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Warmed Over and Not Worth the Time or Ink, December 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy (Hardcover)

The authors offer what they seem to think is a "new" way to view competitive success. Like many management books, the ability to derive framework from illustrations comes with limitations. Most frameworks are illustrable. The true innovations in thinking build from or rail against prevailing work, in books like Porter's or D'Aveni's counterviewpoint Hypercomopetition. What is most frustrating about this book is that it spends a lot of time in what could be said in a few pages, the result perhaps of combining an academic and personal consulting vantage - borrowing your watch to tall you the time in roman numerals! Every good manager knows that first to market isn't per se sustainable and that creating barriers to switching is good. Here, these simple truths are passed off, albeit in different words, as wisdom. Please, guys, like so many others, you would best ply your respective trades in your current arenas and leave the thinking to more cogent thinkers. Bottom-line, I wouldn't offer this for sale even used.