Competing Against Time

Competing Against Time PDF Author: George Stalk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105413
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Today, time is the cutting edge. In fact, as a strategic weapon, contend George Stalk, Jr., and Thomas M. Hout, time is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, even innovation. In this path-breaking book based upon ten years of research, the authors argue that the ways leading companies manage time—in production, in new product development, and in sales and distribution—represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage. With many detailed examples from companies that have put time-based strategies in place, such as Federal Express, Ford, Milliken, Honda, Deere, Toyota, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, Citicorp, Harley-Davidson, and Mitsubishi, the authors describe exactly how reducing elapsed time can make the critical difference between success and failure. Give customers what they want when they want it, or the competition will. Time-based companies are offering greater varieties of products and services, at lower costs, and with quicker delivery times than their more pedestrian competitors. Moreover, the authors show that by refocusing their organizations on responsiveness, companies are discovering that long-held assumptions about the behavior of costs and customers are not true: Costs do not increase when lead times are reduced; they decline. Costs do not increase with greater investment in quality; they decrease. Costs do not go up when product variety is increased and response time is decreased; they go down. And contrary to a commonly held belief that customer demand would be only marginally improved by expanded product choice and better responsiveness, the authors show that the actual results have been an explosion in the demand for the product or service of a time-sensitive competitor, in most cases catapulting it into the most profitable segments of its markets. With persuasive evidence, Stalk and Hout document that time consumption, like cost, is quantifiable and therefore manageable. Today's new-generation companies recognize time as the fourth dimension of competitiveness and, as a result, operate with flexible manufacturing and rapid-response systems, and place extraordinary emphasis on R&D and innovation. Factories are close to the customers they serve. Organizations are structured to produce fast responses rather than low costs and control. Companies concentrate on reducing if not eliminating delays and using their response advantage to attract the most profitable customers. Stalk and Hout conclude that virtually all businesses can use time as a competitive weapon. In industry after industry, they illustrate the processes involved in becoming a time-based competitor and the ways managers can open and sustain a significant advantage over the competition.

Competing Against Time

Competing Against Time PDF Author: George Stalk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105413
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today, time is the cutting edge. In fact, as a strategic weapon, contend George Stalk, Jr., and Thomas M. Hout, time is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, even innovation. In this path-breaking book based upon ten years of research, the authors argue that the ways leading companies manage time—in production, in new product development, and in sales and distribution—represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage. With many detailed examples from companies that have put time-based strategies in place, such as Federal Express, Ford, Milliken, Honda, Deere, Toyota, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, Citicorp, Harley-Davidson, and Mitsubishi, the authors describe exactly how reducing elapsed time can make the critical difference between success and failure. Give customers what they want when they want it, or the competition will. Time-based companies are offering greater varieties of products and services, at lower costs, and with quicker delivery times than their more pedestrian competitors. Moreover, the authors show that by refocusing their organizations on responsiveness, companies are discovering that long-held assumptions about the behavior of costs and customers are not true: Costs do not increase when lead times are reduced; they decline. Costs do not increase with greater investment in quality; they decrease. Costs do not go up when product variety is increased and response time is decreased; they go down. And contrary to a commonly held belief that customer demand would be only marginally improved by expanded product choice and better responsiveness, the authors show that the actual results have been an explosion in the demand for the product or service of a time-sensitive competitor, in most cases catapulting it into the most profitable segments of its markets. With persuasive evidence, Stalk and Hout document that time consumption, like cost, is quantifiable and therefore manageable. Today's new-generation companies recognize time as the fourth dimension of competitiveness and, as a result, operate with flexible manufacturing and rapid-response systems, and place extraordinary emphasis on R&D and innovation. Factories are close to the customers they serve. Organizations are structured to produce fast responses rather than low costs and control. Companies concentrate on reducing if not eliminating delays and using their response advantage to attract the most profitable customers. Stalk and Hout conclude that virtually all businesses can use time as a competitive weapon. In industry after industry, they illustrate the processes involved in becoming a time-based competitor and the ways managers can open and sustain a significant advantage over the competition.

Summary of George Stalk's Competing Against Time

Summary of George Stalk's Competing Against Time PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The competitive environment of the latter twentieth century is characterized by innovations in competitive strategy that take around ten to fifteen years to take effect. Each innovation is followed by major shifts in competitive positions and in corporate fortunes. #2 The five examples in Table 1-1 illustrate the competitive force of timely responsiveness to customer needs. Wal-Mart is one of the fastest growing retailers in the United States. Its stores move nearly $20 billion of merchandise a year. Only K Mart and the floundering giant, Sears, are larger. #3 When a company capitalizes on a strategy innovation, its competitors must change. In times of change, executives have two basic choices: sit out the change until its utility becomes clear or seize the initiative and take action before other competitors do. #4 The most recent innovation in business strategy is time-based competitive advantage. It is a continuum of change that has been affecting business outcomes for the last 40 years.

Hardball

Hardball PDF Author: George Stalk
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1591391679
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Classic Strategies for Unapologetic Winners “It” is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mind-set so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage ¿ they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their “hardball manifesto,” authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group show how hardball competitors can build or maintain an enviable competitive edge by pursuing one or more of the classic “hardball strategies”: unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, devastate profit sanctuaries, raise competitors’ costs, and break compromises. Based on twenty-five years of experience advising and observing a range of companies, the authors argue that hardball competitors can gain extreme competitive advantage ¿ neutralizing, marginalizing, or even destroying competitors ¿ without violating their contracts with customers or employees, and without breaking the rules. A clear-eyed paean to the timeless strategies that have driven the world’s winning companies, Hardball Strategy redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition for a new generation of business players.

Certain to Win

Certain to Win PDF Author: Chet Richards
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450046320
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
"The book is both an excellent primer for those new to Boyd and a catalyst to those with business experience trying to internalize the relevance of Boyd ́s thinking." Chuck Leader, LtCol USMC (Ret.) and information technology company CEO; "A Winning Combination," Marine Corps Gazette, March 2005. Certain to Win [Sun Tzu ́s prognosis for generals who follow his advice] develops the strategy of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd for the world of business. The success of Robert Coram’s monumental biography, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, rekindled interest in this obscure pilot and documented his influence on military matters ranging from his early work on fighter tactics to the USMC ́s maneuver warfare doctrine to the planning for Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately Boyd’s written legacy, consisting of a single paper and a four-set cycle of briefings, addresses strategy only in war. [All of Boyd ́s briefings are available on Slightly East of New.] Boyd and Business Boyd did study business. He read everything he could find on the Toyota Production System and came to consider it as an implementation of ideas similar to his own. He took business into account when he formulated the final version of his “OODA loop” and in his last major briefing, Conceptual Spiral, on science and technology. He read and commented on early drafts of this manuscript, but he never wrote on how business could operate more profitably by using his ideas. Other writers and business strategists have taken up the challenge, introducing Boyd’s concepts and suggesting applications to business. Keith Hammonds, in the magazine Fast Company, George Stalk and Tom Hout in Competing Against Time, and Tom Peters most recently in Re-imagine! have described the OODA loop and its effects on competitors. They made significant contributions. Successful businesses, though, don’t concentrate on affecting competitors but on enticing customers. You could apply Boyd all you wanted to competitors, but unless this somehow caused customers to buy your products and services, you’ve wasted time and money. If this were all there were to Boyd, he would rate at most a sidebar in business strategy. Business is not War Part of the problem has been Boyd’s focus on war, where “affecting competitors” is the whole idea. Armed conflict was his life for nearly 50 years, first as a fighter pilot, then as a tactician and an instructor of fighter pilots, and after his retirement, as a military philosopher. Coram describes (and I know from personal experience) how his quest consumed Boyd virtually every waking hour. It was not a monastic existence, though, since John was above everything else a competitor and loved to argue over beer and cigars far into the night. During most of the 1970s and 80s he worked at the Pentagon, where he could share ideas and debate with other strategists and practitioners of the art of war. The result was the remarkable synthesis we know as Patterns of Conflict. Website

Competing on Capabilities

Competing on Capabilities PDF Author: George Stalk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description


The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management PDF Author:
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230537217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management has been written by an international team of leading academics, practitioners and rising stars and contains almost 550 individually commissioned entries. It is the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field and covers both the theoretical and more empirically/practitioner oriented side of the discipline.

Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now

Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now PDF Author: George Stalk
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422156311
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
It's easy to miss many innovations in strategy until they appear on the front page of a major business publication. But by then everyone--including all your competitors--is using them. As a CEO or senior executive, your job is to detect these strategies?and implement them--before your competitors. That's where this book comes in. Author George Stalk has often been called a guru of business strategy. In the 1980s, before anyone else saw its importance, he and his colleagues at The Boston Consulting Group developed the concept of time-based competition: how meeting the needs of your customers faster than your competitors can give you an unassailable advantage. In this Memo to the CEO, Stalk discusses five strategies that have not yet become widely practiced but are nonetheless worthy of your attention now. He offers advice on how to identify and manage them while they still present opportunities to jump ahead of the competition. They are: Addressing supply chain deficiencies One example of a supply chain crisis is the growing lack of West Coast port capacity. Stalk reviews the strategic implications of this problem, reveals its impact, and recommends specific courses of action. Sidestepping economies of scale Many business leaders are reexamining their assumptions about the benefits of scale. Scaling down, not up, and building "disposable factories" and even "disposable strategies" are becoming new keys to lowering costs and boosting performance. Profiting from dynamic pricing Today, using real-time data, it is increasingly possible to match the price of your product or service with the immediate, second-by-second needs of the customer. Embracing complexity Simplicity is the mantra of the day. But with examples from a few leading-edge companies, Stalk shows that embracing complexity can achieve competitive advantage. Utilizing infinite bandwidth In a world of infinite bandwidth, companies that know how to take advantage of it become more productive, efficient, and profitable, and create entirely new businesses along the way. Written in a refreshingly clear, concise format, Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now is filled with actionable ideas for seizing these emerging strategic opportunities.

Progress and poverty

Progress and poverty PDF Author: Henry George
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description


Competing Against Time

Competing Against Time PDF Author: George W. Housner
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788149350
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Contents: the earthquake's impact on transportation systems; findings (seismology and ground motion; transportation structures; Caltrans seismic design practices; retrofit program; other types of structures); recommendations to improve California's earthquake safety; seismology and ground motion; seismic design codes in California; the California bridge seismic retrofit program; San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge span failure; the Cypress Viaduct collapse; San Francisco freeway viaducts; repair and upgrade of the San Francisco freeway viaducts. Extensive annotated bibliography.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry