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"Competition as we know it is
dead. Business managers who don't face this reality place
their businesses at serious risk."
In this truly epochal work of business strategy,
James Moore boldly demonstrates that for many vibrant companies,
the future is now; that today's great enterprises no longer
compete for product superiority or even industry dominance.
What matters now, and from now on, is total system leadership.
Make no mistake -- business rivalries have never been more
intense. But the playing field is raised, the speed and
stakes multiply geometrically, and the strategic options
have never been more diverse.
"Beyond the death of competition
lies the advent of something new and better."
But what is it?
Grasping the complex, hidden patterns in
today's competitive terrain, Moore envisions a future characterized
by organized chaos. As the old powers wait and wonder, vast
new fortunes flourish where entrepreneurs jostle to integrate
technologies and cultivate utterly new markets of unimaginable
richness.
Inviting readers to approach their own businesses
with equal boldness, Moore introduces biological ecology
as a metaphor for strategic thinking about business coevolution
and radically new cooperative/competitive relationships.
Consider the striking case of IBM, Microsoft, and Intel:
in some markets, deadly antagonists; in others, suppliers
of vital importance to one another; in still others, contestants
in separate games on entirely unrelated fields. From heavy
manufacturing to health care and media, huge interconnected
webs extend across product, market, and even industry boundaries
to define the nature of success for every business. From
his vantage point at the hot centers of global economic
competition, Moore provides a topographical map to competitive
systems, enabling leaders to position their own companies
within interlocking business networks, to identify the development
stage of their system, and to pursue the strategy most likely
to prevail and ultimately dominate the whole.
But a business model for one's own firm
is simply not enough. Leaders must build strong communities
of shared meaning, yielding a special resiliency, flexibility,
and resistance to catastrophe. The Death of Competition
illustrates this robust idea through a vibrant process,
an intricate succession of intriguing detail. Readers thereby
find themselves actively engaged in the roles of corporate
practitioner and business voyeur -- like such ecosystem
visionaries as Andy Grove of Intel, Michael Ovitz of Disney,
and Bill Gates of Microsoft -- in a daunting world where
new technologies, business processes, and organizational
life-forms are continually thrust upon the landscape, upending
and transforming ecosystems on every side.
James F. Moore is one of the world's
foremost advisors on leadership and strategy. His Harvard
Business Review article, "Predators and Prey: A
New Ecology of Competition," won the prestigious McKinsey
Award for best article of 1993. He is the founder and chairman
of Geo-Partners Research, Inc., a strategy consulting and
investment firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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