MIT Sloan Management Review

Why a company can lose touch with its market and how to reorient it through a successful change program.

Managers should consider three economies — consumer, emerging, and survival —when evaluating new business opportunities.

How a paper mill used price-based concepts as part of a strategy to reduce cost and regain profitability.

To sustain excellence, companies need dual strategies —one for the present and one for the future.

Firms have always had difficulty spotting new competitors, and business history is full of stories about incumbent market leaders being displaced by a smart new entrant. If anything, the task seems even harder today.

In the continuous battle for strategic supremacy, leaders and challengers must control the patterns of turbulence and select an appropriate method for creating wealth.

To confront competitive discontinuities, managers must lead their organizations from the zone of comfort to the zone of opportunity.

For the past twenty years, competition has occupied the center of strategic thinking. Indeed, one hardly speaks of strategy without drawing on the vocabulary of competition — competitive strategy, competitive benchmarking, competitive advantages, outperforming the competition.

Strategic failure usually comes from an inability to make clear choices on which customers to target, what products to offer, and how to improve efficiency. Incumbents routinely bow to upstarts that innovate in those areas. The author shows established companies how to prepare for and counter such disruption with a dynamic process of continual strategic renewal.

Increased global competition means that industry and government must work together to ensure that manufacturers have support networks of transportation, telecommunications, services, and knowledge centers.

How can a company successfully attack an established market leader? How can it find new ways to compete that everyone else has missed? By breaking the rules of the game in its industry to find new sources of innovation, says this author. In a study of thirty successful attackers, he identified five ways that they think about and develop a new game plan.

The pricing of services in the United States is a mess. Consider these examples:In 1992, Congress enacted the Cable Act to rein in prices in the cable television industry.

Social activists have long attempted to redefine corporations’ objectives to include “social responsibility.” Yet most economists would argue that a corporate executive’s primary social responsibility is to make a profit for the corporation’s owners, not to appease social activists’ demands.

“Be first to market” is one of the most enduring principles in business theory and practice. But the authors point out that many pioneer companies have failed, whereas most current market leaders were not pioneers. In analyzing why this is so, the authors found that market leaders embody five factors that are critical to success.

Throughout the 1990s, interest in private label brands in the U.S. grocery industry has increased. Store brands currently account for slightly less than 15 percent of total dollar sales.