endofcompetitiveadv - mcgrathThe End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business
By Rita Gunther McGrath

Head: (5 out of 5)
Heart: (3 out of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (5 out of 5)

The gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the real world has grown.  The markets in which companies compete today are dynamic, which have made traditional models for strategy outdated.  Those models reflect a different era in business with a single strategy goal:  to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.  However, the author contends high-growth business opportunities are transient now, making competitive advantage transient as well. New tools and strategies for seizing these waves of opportunities quickly and decisively are needed.

Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York and a globally recognized expert on strategy in uncertain and volatile environments, has written the new playbook for strategy, based on the notion of establishing a transient competitive advantage.  Her approach is fresh, offering tools and practical advice based on extensive research to help companies compete and win in an uncertain business environment. Rich with company examples culled through extensive research, readers will understand the organizational shifts necessary to successfully seize transient business opportunities and thrive:

  • Continuous Reconfiguration:   How companies can build the capability to move from arena to arena, rather than defending existing competitive advantages
  • Healthy Disengagement:  How to move out of an exhausted opportunity to free up and repurpose resources.
  • Using Resource Allocation to Promote Deftness:  How to manage assets and organize for a transient advantage.
  • Building an Innovation Proficiency:  How to establish the right processes for continuous, well-managed innovation.
  • Leadership and Mindset:  In a transient advantage world, prediction and being ‘right’ will be less important than reacting quickly and taking corrective action.
  • Personal Meaning of Transient Advantage.   How to think about your personal career strategy in light of transient advantages.

Leaders who want a new perspective on strategy to quickly exploit and move in and out of advantages for a competitive edge will want to add this book to their reading list. Buy the book