Customer Reviews

Profit Patterns : 30 Ways to Anticipate & Profit from Strategic Forces Reshaping your Business

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The book identifies 30 "profit patterns". The patterns are categorized, and each one identifies some revenue mechanic or some interesting competitive strategy. Each pattern is supplemented with examples as well as with a brief case.

This book inspired me for some strategies in my early days as an freelance strategy consultant, I implemented a variation of the "Micro Segmentation" pattern with great results.

The book comes also with a brief description of the strategy development process utilized by Mercer Management consulting. The description is usefull, although you will need probably more details to take full advantage of it.

And please don't expect to much new things - if you already did read 20 books on strategy, this will not add much more. But also don't expect to find common stuff like the BCG portfolio, it's still not THAT basic.

Overall in my opinion this is THE BIBLE of profit patterns, from time to time I still pick the book from my shelf and review some of my favourite patterns...

As in The Profit Zone, the co-authors pose and then answer key questions. They also provide numerous checklists which enable the thoughtful reader to undertake a rigorous self-diagnosis. For example, in Part II, such questions and checklists direct and enrich understanding of Mega Patterns, Value Chain Patterns, Channel Patterns, Product Patterns, Knowledge Patterns, and Organizational Patterns. In effect, the authors create an infrastructure within which to organize and then correlate the most relevant experiences of dozens of corporations with the specific circumstances of the reader's own organization. Better yet, although most of the corporations discussed are among the "Fortune 100", this infrastructure can also be of substantial (if not even greater) value to small-to-midsize companies as well.

In Part III, Slywotsky & Morrison explain HOW "Strategic Anticipation" enables managers to anticipate and respond quickly to patterns as they unfold. Strategic Anticipation helps managers to "move where the value will be." Patterns "hint at the future strategic story of a company or industry, explain the past and describe the present." Those who have not read Profit Patterns and do not plan to do so can only hope is that the same is true of their competitors. But don't bet on it.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Slywotzky's recently published The Upside as well as Ram Charan's Know-How and Richard Ogle's Smart World.