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Summary: The MBA book on "economical" Strategy
Review: Excellent book! The book covers (all) the aspects of Microeconomics/Strategy in a fantastic and very readable manner. Ok, there's quantitative stuff, but kept down to a minimum. Personally, one of the view "must buy" text books in strategic management.
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Summary: Excellent Coverage but...
Review: Filled with the most current information and packed full of the latest theories, this book delivers on it's promise to deliver an analytical base for economic strategy. But some sections contain high fog counts and complicated discussions to describe relatively simple concepts. Some of the examples offered as proof of theory seem forced. Instead of proving the theory, they show that other (undiscussed) strategic influences are at work. While expanded awareness is definitely a good thing, such examples tend to undermine the theories they purport to prove.
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Summary: Clearing the fog in tackling corporate strategy
Review: For those who have become disenchanted with the faddish rhetoric of corporate strategy, and seek more rigorous analytical grounding than offered in most "inspirational" business books, this text by three faculty members of Northwestern University and of Purdue University is refreshing. The text recapitulates the key tools of micreconomic theory in a masterful introductory chapter which covers cost theory and game theory. The rest of the book is structured around the four classes of issues which the authors see as the essence of strategic analysis: firm boundaries, market and competitive analysis, position and dynamics, and internal organization. The text is full of excellent examples and mini case studies from a wide range of industries. I have not found it easy to find many other texts which achieve this balance of analytical rigor and practical business-oriented empirical focus.
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Summary: Great Primer on Economics
Review: If you're an absolute beginner on Economics, this is the book for you. It has all the theory about the decison-making process within great corporations.
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Summary: A book that reasons the strategies
Review: Many business books provide models of competition, innovation, etc. without adequately reasoning how the models were reached. Whereas they provide solutions to a problem - they do not provide the understanding of how the solution is reached.
However, this book provides a sound reasoning for every model on the basis of microeconomics. Even apparently abstract concepts like organization structure are explained on the basis of economics. I personally feel that the concepts covered in this book have been ingrained in my mind.
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Summary: Good Point of View
Review: Quite a good book: a clear and well organized view on the basic economic concepts behind strategy decision that, too often, are not taken into consideration. I used it to re-build the foundations to understanding strategic options.
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Summary: THE Book for Students of Strategy
Review: This book has it all: a hardcore economics-based view of the activities of the firm, a thorough discussion of the major schools of strategic thought, solid case analyses and even review of organizational behavior and culture. Those Chicago students should be learning a lot from Kellogg...
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Summary: Strategy is more than blah, blah, blah
Review: This book offers a very modern approach on strategy, including economics foundations and numeric solving of the different strategic concepts analyzed. The book is not for everyone, you need to have basic knowledge on business management, economics and math. As an MBA manager and academic, the book gave me new vision and a strong base on the strategy concepts. I recommend this book for every MBA student and manager.
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Summary: Great treatment of strategy
Review: This book treats strategy from a strong grounding in micro economics. Forces strategic thinking to be grounding in fundamentals unlike a lot of hand waving you see in other books. Highly recommended
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Summary: Firm¡¯s strategic positioning
Review: This is a textbook for MBA classes both on business strategy and on business economics which focuses on the economics of industry and firm. Textbook is supposed to introduce students to the vocabulary of each discipline, not to specific or uncommon theory. So it¡¯s far from singular or creative. Nevertheless, to be a good textbook, at least in social sciences, it should meet two criteria:
1.it should relate concepts to empirical cases. Social sciences are the empirical sciences. So their concepts are also empirical. But when I took economics courses, textbooks led me to think ¡®economics is no more than a math exercise.¡¯ When deriving and calculating ISLM model, for example, you could not disagree with me. And worse, such a knowledge could be neither applicable nor realistc, and could not endure against student¡¯s amnesia. In this regard, this book is worth recommending. It¡¯s full of cases from real business world and always attempts to explain concepts in the real world meaning.
2.A good textbook should have a consistent framework which integrate various concepts introduced in the book into a coherent and meaningful whole. This book, from start to end, raises the question, ¡®What is the business strategy?¡¯ the business strategy is about how to attain competitive advantage, put another way, how to strategically position one¡¯s firm in the competitive environment. Competition increase the supply of output in the market, and drive down price, therefore, profitability. The firm is the organization to earn profit. Them the strategy of firm is how to earn higher profit than competitors¡¯. When a firm earns a higher profit rate than the average rate of competitors , the firm has a competitive advantage in the market. A firm¡¯s profitability within a market depends both on market-led economics and firm¡¯s capabilities. Part I and II of this book is about what constitutes and affect firms¡¯s market and industry or firm¡¯s environment. Part III is about how to achieve and sustain competitive advantage or about firm¡¯s strategic positioning. In a nutshell, a firm has the ultimate objective to earn higher profit rate. To achieve that goal depends both on firm¡¯s environment and on firm¡¯s own capabilities. Strategy is firm¡¯s interaction with its environment.
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