Strategic Management : Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Rating:
Summary: Strategic Management (2nd Edition) by Pitts & Lei
Review: Pitts & Lei's (revised) 2nd edition is a solid, well-written strategic management textbook. Topical coverage is both traditional and well informed. The only exception to the foregoing is Chapter 11 that seems to be slightly "muddy" and confusing. From my perspective, as an instructor who has taught strategic management for the last fifteen years and actually practiced strategic management for fifteen years in industry, the only "missing element" is a chapter on "network" or virtual organizations. Chapter 12 (Managing Strategic Change) and Chapter 13 (Redefining Advantage) are excellent, both in terms of content and exposition.

The book includes cases (suitable for classroom discussion) and review questions in each chapter. Each chapter also has an excellent set of references. The ancillaries are complete with the exception that no test bank is provided for an instructor's use. I recommend this text to anyone teaching undergraduate strategic management and also to any reader interested in learning what strategic management is all about.

This book compares quite favorably to several of the much more expensive strategy texts like David, Thompson and Strickland and Pearce and Robinson. The book is good value for the money.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst textbooks that I have ever used
Review: This textbook is the required text for a graduate level business course in which I am currently enrolled. My opinion, as well as nearly all of my classmates, is that this book offers very little for those in business wanting to learn about strategic management.

An example of what I mean is the following sentence taken from the book: "Firms that have built substantial sources of competitive advantage often enjoy high levels of profitability." Really? The text continues to state obvious points such as this.

This book contains about 10 % of material and 90 % filler. It could probably have been condensed to about 20 pages of bullet points without losing any of the content. Many textbooks have a problem with lack of brevity, however this book is the worst that I can remember since my days in high school.

As a business professional who values his time, I do not have time to waste reading filler. This book is so poor that if it wasn't being used to teach the final course in my program I would have dropped the course.