New Book Review: "The End of Competitive Advantage"
New book review for The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, by Rita Gunther McGrath, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013:
Copy provided by author Rita Gunther McGrath.
While the term "competitive advantage" can be defined in more than one way, it can be argued that sustainable competitive advantage over rivals (i.e. holding on to market positioning relative to other industry players) is really a chief business goal when following such a strategy. Authors A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin in their recent "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" (see my review) show from their experience that "no strategy lasts forever" and that "strategies need continual improvement and updating", but Rita Gunther McGrath demonstrates the need for firms to take these steps further, resulting in the likelihood of considerably more movement over time.
The author explains that there have been two foundational assumptions taken as gospel in the past: (1) "industry matters most", and (2) "once achieved, advantages are sustainable." While advantages can continue to be sustained in some industry sectors, these scenarios are becoming increasingly less frequent, and the author's research in this space demonstrates that "stability, not change, is the state that is most dangerous in highly dynamic competitive environments", and that "one of the biggest changes we need to make in our assumptions is that within-industry competition is the most significant competitive threat."