Staying Power Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World (Lessons from Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, Toyota and More)

by Cusumano, Michael A.

• ISBN13: 9780199218967
• ISBN10: 019921896X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780191641404
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

Business news tends to focus on the travails of a handful of giants: Apple's iPad, the Toyota recall, the controversy over Google's book-digitization program. Whatever the day's headlines, though, most of these firms have been there before--up and down, written off and overpraised--yet they endured and triumphed. What is their secret? What is it that has lifted them to preeminence and allowed them to come out of each crisis stronger than before? In Staying Power , Michael A. Cusumano provides the answers. A bestselling business author and leading scholar, Cusumano has spent a quarter of a century studying the world's most successful companies--many of them from the inside, by serving as an advisor to more than one hundred firms. He identifies six critical principles that have driven the success of today's foremost companies, including Google, Intel, Apple, JVC, Toyota, and Microsoft. He argues that companies today must develop distinctive organizational capabilities , not just business strategies; focus on platforms and services , not just products; pull information from the market, responding to real-time changes in demand and competitive conditions, and not just push products out; achieve economies of scope, not just scale, by creating efficiencies across all a firm's activities; and acquire flexibility , in addition to efficiency, to quickly adapt to a volatile marketplace. Drawing on real-life examples, he illustrates how the best companies put these principles into practice, identifying precisely how these ideas have lead to concrete success time after time. Business books, the author notes, often promote short-lived fads in management thinking. But Staying Power is different. Written by a bestselling international expert, this book focuses on lasting success, analyzing the fundamental elements common to the leading competitors in the world today.

Author Biography

Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in MIT's Engineering Systems Division. His books include Microsoft Secrets and Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by Businessweek.