Business

Includes:
Porter. "What is Strategy?" and "The Five Forces that Shape Strategy."
Kim and Mauborgne. "Blue Ocean Strategy."

Organized around three primary categories: Competition and Strategy: Core Concepts, The Competitiveness of Location, and Competitive Solutions to Societal Problems, this collection of articles develops the building blocks that define competitive strategy as we know it. It addresses the important issues of competition.

Blue Ocean Strategy argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans”--untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

The best of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s articles on blue ocean strategy, all in one place.

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures.

Often the efforts of individual units within an organization are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance. In this book, the authors apply their Balanced Scorecard system to corporate-level strategy, revealing how highly successful enterprises achieve powerful synergies by explicitly defining corporate headquarters' role in setting, coordinating, and overseeing organizational strategy.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Competitive Advantage introduces a tool that may be used to diagnose and enhance competitive advantage: the value chain. Value-chain analysis allows the manager to separate the underlying activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, and distributing its product or service.

Understanding the concepts that Michael Porter has written about: Competitive advantage, the value chain, Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost.