Competitive Solutions or Best Practices in Organization Development and Change

Competitive Solutions: The Strategist's Toolkit

Author: R Preston McAfe

Competitive Solutions is an entertaining and wideranging introduction to successful business methods applied to a variety of real-world situations. Rejecting the one-size-fits-all premise that underlies so many guides to business strategy, Preston McAfee develops the intellectual tools and insights needed to confront many marketplace problems. Drawing on his broad experience as a consultant for major U.S. companies, as well as extensive research, McAfee emphasizes cooperation, pricing, litigation, and antitrust as vital to a firm's competitive posture--and focuses more attention on these elements than do most business strategy accounts.

McAfee begins by considering strategy as successfully applied by America OnLine, an example that introduces many of the tools discussed in greater depth throughout the book. From here he moves to industry analysis: By examining the context for developing a strategy, he points out uses of positioning and differentiation that enable a firm to weaken price competition and deter rivals from stealing customers. McAfee's exploration of a product's life cycle proves an invaluable guide to positioning new technology in order to maximize the potential for future customers.

In the centerpiece of the book, McAfee lays out a how-to manual for cooperation, providing tactics crucial for setting standards, lobbying the government, and fostering industry growth. Writing in a conversational manner, McAfee also addresses such deep topics as organizational design and employee compensation and incentives. More detailed discussions examine antitrust enforcement, which is an increasingly important constraint on strategy, as well as strategies for pricing,bidding, signaling, and bargaining.

This book is a fascinating examination of modern business strategy and its application in many different settings. Students of business and economics--as well as executives and managers--will recognize Competitive Solutions as an indispensable resource as well as a definitive vision of the strategic firm: one in which each element of company strategy reinforces the other elements.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction	1
2	Industry analysis	9
3	Firm strategies	36
4	Differentiation	61
5	Product life cycle	91
6	Cooperation	113
7	Organizational scope	148
8	Incentives	187
9	Antitrust	204
10	Elementary statistics	225
11	Pricing	260
12	Auctions	303
13	Signaling	324
14	Bargaining	353
15	Last words	379

Interesting book: Alan Wongs New Wave Luau or Halloween Celebrations

Best Practices in Organization Development and Change: Culture, Leadership, Retention, Performance, Coaching

Author: David Giber

Learn from experts at the world's top organizations!

Best Practices in Organization Development and Change is a state-of-the-art resource that presents the most important ideas and effective strategies from experts and top companies in the field. Comprehensive in scope, the book addresses the five most important organization development or human resource development (OD/HRD) topics--organization development and change, leadership development, recruitment and retention, performance management, and coaching and mentoring--and offers a practical framework for design, implementation, and evaluation. It includes best-practice case studies from seventeen leading organizations that have achieved their change objectives.

The case studies will help you:

• Analyze the need for the specific OD/HRD initiative

• Build a solid business case for OD/HRD

• Identify the audience for the initiative

• Design an effective OD/HRD initiative

• Implement a successful design of the initiative

• Evaluate the effectiveness of the initiative

You'll benefit from expertise at trend-setting companies such as: Kraft Foods * Smithkline Beecham * Westinghouse * Sun Microsystems . . . and many more!

"An extremely important volume with useful contextual perspectives plus vivid and important case studies of companies that know what they're doing to lead change."

--Warren Bennis, author, On Becoming a Leader and Organizing Genius