ISBN: 1578512301
List Price: $29.95
Amazon Price: $18.87
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Define your core business clearly
The authors of this book see 3 essential elements separating a good growth strategy, one that is successful from a poor growth strategy, one that fails:
� The company must reach its full potential in its core business or businesses.
� Once a company has reached its potential in its core business, it must then expand to the logical businesses that surround the core business.
� A company must preemptively redefine its core business in response to the first signs of changes in the marketplace.
The foundation of sustained growth, according to these authors, rests in establishing a strong foundation: a clear definition of the company's core business. The authors present a series of ten questions designed to aid businesses in defining their core business clearly.
There are pitfalls along the way, and the authors present several growth pitfalls to avoid:
� Expanding toward an entrenched position, where the company has relatively low odds of achieving leadership
� Overestimating the profit pool.
� "False Bundling"- trying to be all things to all customers.
� Invaders from unexpected fronts.
In order to deal with market changes, the authors offer five key changes that are most threatening to a company's growth:
� Erosion of low-end product segments.
� Erosion of customer segments.
� Erosion of micro-segments.
� Erosion of traditional business boundaries.
� New intermediaries and new control points.
Summary: Skip this one and read the sequel instead
This is not a terrible book- it has some interesting case studies which the authors use to prove their points. However, there is not a great deal in here that is new if you've read the sequel to this book first ("Beyond the Core", Zook), and have read other
There are some good points about this book. I like the parts about defining the business boundaries, mapping adjacencies, reacting to competitor threats, etc. However, I feel that I got a lot more out of the sequel than from this book. Perhaps I would have rated it higher if I read it first, or if I hadn't already read so many books on this theme. Surely Zook and Allen should not pay the price for this, so I have factored this in to my score.
Additionally, I suppose I can't blame them for writing highly of Enron and even using them as an example of successful "redefinition of the core"- everyone was fooled, although you think that the top consulting firm in Boston would have become suspicious, considering the great fall it sustained shortly afterward. Perhaps the sequel served in part to correct this mistake.
This book was premature; it would have been best to combine this with the sequel into one book. If you skip this and read only the latter, you won't be missing much.
Summary: Very Realistic and very useful
This book is very good, it explains very clearly the different growth concepts with clear definitions, and a very interesting growth matrix. in addition, unlike other books, this book uses a lot of real world examples to illustarte the different concepts and growth startegies. It explains how companies, that succeded, evolved from their core business and developed new products without getting lost in the process. Also, explains why and how some companies failed. The book is realistic, and gives you some tools and matrix that you can apply when analyzing and developing a growth strategy. You should also check out the web site, it has some examples of how to apply the gowth matrix.
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