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Summary: The Utimate Business Quest
Review: The quest to find the ultimate competitive advantage is one that all businesses should be focused on. Reading the book, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage, will inspire business owners and leaders to make this quest into a continuous business challenge. All business owners understand that they should be continually examining the operations of there businesses with an eye towards improving those processes. This book helps the reader focus on ways to improve their fundamental business model and provides real life examples of how other business have improved their own business models. It also provides many useful suggestions on how to improve numerous business models. A quality read on a vital business topic.
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Summary: Must for Businesses Looking to Make Changes
Review: Any business owner, or business executive, whether overseeing a Fortune 500 corporation, or a small neighborhood business, who is making a serious assessment of how the business should be improved to operate more effectively, should not make any final decisions before reading this book. The writers urge readers to push their thinking beyond conventional bottom-line and analysis, by looking at the entire business model. This approach encourages the type of out-of-the-box thinking that allows quantum leaps of progress, not just the conventional incremental progress from the usual business solutions, like raising prices or lowering expenses. THE ULTIMATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE helps stimulate thinking toward more creative ideas. The book also offers numerous real-world examples, avoiding an overly theoretical approach that can render some books in this category unhelpful. And the examples are from huge businesses like General Motors, mid-range businesses like Claire's Boutiques, and smaller operations like a neighborhood dry cleaner. Case studies are not even limited to for-profit businesses; Habitat for Humanity is used as a productive example. Also, the "Key Questions" sections offer an efficient, easy method for applying the concepts to specific businesses. This book is for those who are anxious to think of out-of-the-box for their business's future, and for those who know they should try to push the envelope, but aren't sure exactly where to start as they take tentative steps out of their comfort zones. As a proud American writer, living and working in the United States, I believe in the awesome power of the free-enterprise capitalist system, coupled with a political system that encourages individual liberty and responsibility. This system has created more wealth and comfort for more humans than any other political or social innovation in history. THE ULTIMATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE celebrates these ideals, by giving business owners and operators of all shapes and sizes, ways to become more productive, not just with short-term monetary success, but with a method, a way of thinking, for changing and improving constantly. This is the key to the success of the free enterprise system - constant innovation and improvement driven by competition in the marketplace.
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Summary: Great Practical Advice
Review: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage provides the reader with great, practical advice on how to establish a business model innovation mindset. Using a multitude of real-life examples to illustrate their points, Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles clearly lay out the steps to business model innovation. You will get ideas for how to: increase the value of what your business provides to its customer, increase profitability, eliminate costs that provide little or no value to the customers, pursue business models with a higher potential for growth and profitability, expand your thinking about who your stakeholders really are and what they are owed, and how to do all of this over and over again. Each chapter ends with a set of questions to help the reader apply what was learned to their personal situation. The questions, alone, are worth the price of the book. And you get one more bonus. Mitchell and Coles clearly write with a conscience that has been sorely lacking in some of the leaders making recent headlines.
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Summary: The Future of Business Competition
Review: If you are looking for a well-written and extensively researched business management and leadership book that will challenge your beliefs about what it takes to be successful and is full of many thought-provoking ideas, questions, and real-world examples to stimulate your organizational thinking, then this book is for you. The authors did a great job explaining a lot of current "best practices" in use by recognized innovative businesses. Then, they made a very strong case that future competitiveness in today's dynamic, globally connected world depends on a holistic commitment to institutionalizing "best practices" into business model (the "who," "what," "when," "why," "where," "how," and "how much" of providing products and services) innovation that continually meets and exceeds stakeholders' (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, distributors, shareholders, lenders, communities, etc.) needs and expectations while remaining true to a solid core of corporate values and principles. As a "business-novice" I sometimes had trouble following and understanding some of the similar-sounding "down-in-the-weeds" business terms. But, I really liked the authors' approach in giving readers many tools and options to innovate their business models based on their own situations. The authors made clear that organizations can either innovate their business models every 2-4 years or they can stagnate, wither, and die. The authors' most important revelation is that their common-sense approach to making continuous business model innovation a priority is not a common practice: only a few businesses have even begun to 'scratch-the-surface' of this achievable vision of the future of business. I believe the best way to face the future is to help create it, and reading this book can be a great start to creating your competitively advantageous future.
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Summary: Good Book on Business Strategy
Review: This book is really a lesson in strategy. Many businesses view strategy as a static thing. They're doing something, it works, stick with it. In fact, a strategy works only as long as the ever changing environment favors it. Thereafter, it goes into decay. The authors present a solid lesson in the need to a develop fluid adaptive strategy that can change as the business environment evolves. The book further goes on to explain how strategic advantages can be implemented. Strategic planners and marketeers would be especially interested in the thoughts presented here.
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Summary: A great fire-starter.
Review: I suspect that, like myself, many consultants who read this book would like to put it into the hands of some specific clients. It does an excellent job of brainstorming through the pros and the cons of various approaches to business model development. It contains many practical tips, clear reference examples, and good ideas about ways to go forward with any of its main chapter topics. With many business books, you feel like a good article has been expanded into a so-so book, but Mitchell and Coles do a good job of keeping focused on their subject. The book is exactly as long as it needs to be, no more and no less.
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Summary: A Resource You DO NOT Want Your Competitors To Have!
Review: Businesses frequently languish in the hands of leaders who choose to follow the beaten path of conventional wisdom. Mitchell and Coles provide the ultimate lesson in progressive thinking. "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" will open your eyes to an unlimited world of business innovation and greater profitability simply by changing the way you think, and by keeping the development process rolling. Constant change is proving to be the new standard of modern business, and those who remain stagnant will not remain in the game for long!
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Summary: A highly worthwhile read
Review: First, I'll thank the first author for the complimentary copy upon which this review is based. I'd want anyone running a business I depended on to be familiar with the ideas in this book. Unfortunately (if you're an employee or customer and not a competitor), most organizations aren't very proficient in them. One reason for this is that most of the ideas are much easier said than done. Another is that implementation of these ideas are most likely to occur when an organization's leaders and employees are passionate about maximizing the impact of their organization. I believe that this applies to the authors, and that any reader of this book wanting to "Do well by doing good," a goal they frequently invoke, would quickly pick up on several possible innovations.
I subscribed to Executive Book Summaries for a year and didn't renew, because 80% of the new business books coming out were so much drivel. I really wish they would summarize this book, because even a summary would make clear that much of value can be taken from it. And, the authors would benefit from collaborating in a summarization. Their lengthy research process, described in detail, made it clearly impossible to include everything they would have liked. This probably led to the shortcoming that one other reviewer noted - the two forwards, preface, introduction and prologue are too lengthy. So is Part 1. The book is half over at the end of Part 1, with Part 2, 3, and 4 left to go. But, that's where most of the books value was for me. I often put bookmarks in the best parts of books, for future review. The first of these, "Values that support the best business models," is in part 2, with about a dozen following. Minor gripe: the publisher (or editor) should lose the text-boxes scattered throughout the book. I think an AI program picking them at random would be better. A thorough reader is just annoyed by the repetition. I'd also prefer footnotes at the foot of the page where they occur, and many more of them. This would particularly valuable in follow-up material to some of the facts they cite. The book mentions Berkshire Hathaway in passing, but I think that company deserves a full treatment in light of their thesis. At first glance, Berkshire excels at superb execution of the "same old" business model, but, beneath it all, they would discover a wealth of business model innovations. Similarly, they devote some discussion to Peter Drucker, but I think similar attention to Edward Deming would yield fruits. All the above comments could be addressed in a second edition (and I think there will be one). But the bottom line is that their insights offer a great upside by being applied, and are ignored only at great peril. Numerous positive and negative examples amply illustrate this. The examples are perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book, which is a good thing, because they are generous with them. I read this book cover-to-cover, and even the acknowledgement section at the end was valuable. I'm going to recommend it to several others personally, in addition to this review.
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Summary: Great Book For Entrepreneurs and Executives
Review: Entrepreneurs and business executives looking to improve their business operations will enjoy "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model" by Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles. After studying 100 select public companies, Mitchell and Coles conclude that the key factor in improving a company's sale's growth and profitability is constantly refining and improving the company's business model. The authors define a business model as: "...the who, what, when, where, why, and how much a company uses to provide its goods and services and receive value for its efforts." Mitchell and Coles say the most successful entrepreneurs often made improvements to their initial business model, leading them to focus upon continual business model innovation and to constantly seek new ways of doing business. Mitchell and Coles write: "Nothing else ... worked as well for them for improving performance. In the process, they created companies that enjoyed astonishing success for many years compared to competitors, as measured by market share, profitability, employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, recognition, and stock-price growth." Using the radio station Clear Channel as an example, Mitchell and Coles describe the process of business model innovation: - The radio station became more profitable by realizing advertisers are crucial radio station stakeholders and developing more advertiser-focused programming. - Using what it learned about making its programming more desirable to advertisers, Clear Channel began acquiring other radio stations and implementing its knowledge to make the acquired stations more advertiser-friendly and, hence, profitable. - Clear Channel focused upon building a "portfolio" of stations, designed to give advertisers maximum advertising exposure over a geographic area. Clear Channel wanted to reach listeners in a given location, regardless of the type of radio station the listener preferred. - Clear Channel began selling bundled advertising packages which gave them a strong competitive advantage over competing radio stations, which only reached listeners interested in a particular type of music or programming. - Clear Channel realized that bundling advertising gave a key competitive advantage over other radio stations, so it moved into billboard advertising to add a dimension to its advertising packages. - Focusing even more upon providing advertisers a strong incentive to advertise through Clear Channel, the company began representing talent and attaching stars to advertising packages. Continually improving its business model, Clear Channel moved from being just another radio station into becoming an advertiser-friendly media powerhouse. Quoting Sun Tzu, Mitchell and Coles point out that "Opportunities multiply as they are seized." How do you continually find improvements to your business model? Mitchell and Coles write: "The best way to get more innovations is to be sure that there are lots of ideas in the pipeline, and that low-risk and low-cost ideas proceed rapidly into experimentation and testing." According to Mitchell and Coles, how a company cost-effectively accesses the best thinking of industry experts and experts outside the industry is itself an area for innovation. As an example, Mitchell and Coles describe gold-mining company Goldcorp's innovative online program that offered geologists cash prizes for discovering better ways of finding and extracting gold from its fifty-year-old Red Lake mine, which many experts believed was tapped out. Mitchell and Coles write: "More than 1,400 prospectors registered for the challenge. ... A year after the contest ended, the company announced that exploration based on the winning submissions had located six million additional ounces of gold reserves. ... The ultimate revenue from mining the newly found gold will exceed one billion dollars, and profits will probably be several hundred million dollars. The prizes cost only $575,000, much less than the unproductive exploratory drilling that would otherwise have occurred." "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" says Red Hat, the company selling a Linux-based operating system, is another company seeking to benefit from top-notch expertise acquired at a low-cost innovative way by relying upon open source code as the kernel of its operating system. This gives Red Hat a chance to compete with powerhouse Microsoft. Other areas of innovation described in "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" include: - Changing pricing structure or price perceptions to increase profitability. - Have partners and suppliers help you find ways to add desirable benefits to your company's products and services. - Add benefits that expand a company's market share by offering benefits to your customer's customers. For example, Linear Technology, a manufacturer of semiconductor chips for wireless devices and cell phones, found that by decreasing the power drain of its chips, it could significantly extend battery life, making it the preferred chip maker for wireless devices. -Walk in your customer's shoes to discover their true needs and wishes. - Eliminate unnecessary costs that burden the customer. For example, drop-off dry cleaning bins eliminate the expense of a dry cleaner staying open 24 hours a day to offer service at all hours. - Outsource certain company functions to allow time to be refocused into more profitable endeavors. Too many companies seek ways to improve things they didn't do well in the past, rather than finding more profitable future endeavors. Mitchell and Coles write: "Work on a business model that has a hundred times the potential of your current one, and even a weak beginning can turn into runaway success." - Consider ways to customize offerings to make them more nearly match an individual customer's needs. "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" says entrepreneurs should avoid any business model which harms any stakeholders and should seek to fairly divide the benefits of business model innovation among all company stakeholders. "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage" is a great addition to any entrepreneur's or executive's business library.
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Summary: Paradigm Change for the 21st Century Business
Review: Gadzooks man! When I first started this book and read the business models of the featured companies, I thought "What?! These people are literally gambling at the way they do business!" But the more I read, the more convincing it was to understand that to have the competitive edge in today's business world, you've got the option to think outside of the box. Using real world business models, author's Mitchell & Coles explain how you can cause your company to have the competitive advantage by simply changing your company's business model. No matter what the size of your company, this book is a definite tool in creating your business model. Most companies restructure and reorganize, hoping to attain business effectiveness & success. Yet the "Ultimate Competitors Advantage" will help you discover ways to reinvent your business model that will not only meet the needs of your customers, but bring strong profitability's back into the company and spread from the employees to the shareholders. All around success! So put an end to the business model that says, "We've always done it this way." Buy this book, and allow it to help mold and guide your imaginations into 21st century business model innovation!
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