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Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition (Paperback)
by Craig S. Fleisher, Babette Bensoussan
| Category:
Competitive intelligence, Competitive study, Marketing, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 950.00
MSL price:
¥ 848.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An extremely good reference guide to Strategic and Competitive Analysis. |
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Author: Craig S. Fleisher, Babette Bensoussan
Publisher: Prentice Hall; US Ed edition
Pub. in: April, 2002
ISBN: 0130888524
Pages: 457
Measurements: 9.9 x 8 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01585
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0130888525
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- MSL Picks -
I just received this book a couple of days ago, and am very glad that I did! I had previously read another book by one of the authors and the other author is a well-known CI consultant from my home country. For those of you not already in the know, yes we have some world-class authors in addition to our world-class athletes.
As a consultant, I am always doing analytical work for my clients and have often had to search around for material to support the techniques that I frequently used. Well, my searching and scrounging days are over now that I have this handy guide! I put this book to immediate work on a couple of projects I am doing and can tell you that it has already returned the purchase price several times over in the amount of time it saved me from having to dig up information from a variety of sources about the included techniques.
The book does some things none of the other previous sources I used did by providing both the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques as well as a detailed "how to" apply them step-by-step with actual examples. This is unique to my knowledge as the sources I have used nearly always give just a few paragraphs on the technique and little if any background as to their unique characteristics. Thank you to the two authors for doing us a favour on that aspect.
I also appreciate that the book includes coverage of 24 different techniques. I have used about ten of these over the last few years, and had heard of several of the other ones but hadn't yet applied them in a project. The coverage of each technique is pretty thorough to be sure, but some (like financial ratio and statement analysis, management profiling) will obviously get used more frequently than others (like S-curve analysis). Also, the authors provide approaches that have been tested in the real-world, which is better to my mind than book-length theoretical treatises that sometimes accompany applications of these methods.
I will be buying spare copies of this book to provide for my subs so that I can be sure they will have guidance for properly utilizing these techniques. I think I may also get a few for some of my clients so that they can tell I haven't conjured up my findings on their projects, but actually based them on rigorous techniques.
One thing I found interesting is that my volume is a soft-covered version. This is nice in that it likely saved me some money but I think I would have preferred a hard cover version as this book is likely best used as a reference text that will be coming on and off my shelf frequently over the course of my projects. Last but not least, I wonder and hope that these authors will do another text in the future that will provide coverage of additional techniques in the manner that they have accomplished with this book.
(From quoting Heath Sturt, Australia)
Target readers:
Business schools, strategy consultants and MBAs.
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Authors Craig S. Fleisher and Babette E. Bensoussan are uniquely placed as experts in the field of strategic and competitive analysis. They have extensive corporate consulting, research, and teaching experience in strategy and competitive intelligence and have both published and spoken internationally. Their collaboration also brings to this book a healthy balance of both theory and application.
Craig S. Fleisher is Odette Research Chair and Professor of Business (Strategy and Entrepreneurship), Odette School of Business, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. A member of the Canadian Who's Who and Who's Who in Canadian Business, he has also held positions on the faculties of the University of Pittsburgh (United States), Sydney (Australia), and Calgary and Wilfrid Laurier Universities (Canada). Elected as Canada's first Fellow of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), Craig is an active author and researcher who has written 5 books and over 100 articles, has founded and/or served on the board of regional SCIP chapters, has facilitated workshops or guest lectured on CI around the globe, and serves on the editorial board of the Competitive Intelligence Review.
Babette E. Bensoussan is Director the MindShifts Group Pty. Ltd., a Sydney, Australia-based organization specializing in strategic planning, competitive intelligence, and strategic marketing projects in the Asia Pacific region. For over 10 years, she has undertaken major studies and consulted to Australian and Global Fortune 500 companies in strategic business and marketing planning, competitive intelligence, and strategic analysis in such industries and markets as aerospace, information technology, waste services, pharmaceuticals, utilities, mining, and manufacturing operations - to just name a few. Babette is Vice President of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals in Australia (SCIP Aust), is a member of the NSW Board of Adult and Community Education, a member of the Competitive Intelligence Review editorial board, and was the first international recipient of the SCIP Fellows Award in 1996.
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From Publisher
BASIC APPROACH:
This supplemental book examines the wide spectrum of techniques involved in analyzing business, competitive data, and information in a comprehensive manner with a strong bias toward application.
Over twenty analytical tools are discussed and evaluated with examples to illustrate their most effective application. Presents the most applicable techniques across a broad range of applications in the analysis process.
FEATURES/BENEFITS:
- Consistent format for each technique - description, background, rationale and implications, advantages, limitations, process, related tools.
- Coverage of "classic" as well as more popular contemporary techniques.
- FAROUT - A unique evaluation process for each model identifying ease of, use and practicality.
- Designed to be frequently used as a handy comparison and reference source.
- Examinations and applications of techniques used in real organizations.
Please see the Prentice Hall Custom Business Web site for the largest educational database available for the Strategy course.
www.prenhall.com/custombusiness
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Given the priority of competitiveness in modern companies, practitioners of competitive intelligence (CI) need to come to terms with what business and competitive analysis is and how it works. More importantly, they need to be able to convert the wealth of available data and information into a valuable form for decision making and action. Collected data must be converted into intelligence. This is accomplished through analysis.
Strategic and Competitive Analysis is a book about analysis. We know that using this term often makes the groups we advise and teach uncomfortable. People often conjure up images of the genius wearing glasses inputting oodles of data into arcane computer programs while simultaneously sifting through reams of paper containing differential equations and advanced statistics. This image does not meet the reality of today's effective analysts who know that analysis does not have to be complicated, complex, or convoluted to be valuable. As we try to remind our audiences, being a good analyst does not require ten years of postgraduate education, just some basic common sense, smarts, and a desire to learn. Nevertheless, analysis is one of the more difficult and critical roles a consultant, strategist, or intelligence specialist is called upon to perform. Although great strides have been made in recent years in terms of planning strategic and intelligence projects and collecting data, the same cannot be said for analysis.
The growth of competitive intelligence during the 1990s was fast paced. More and more conferences, workshops, and university courses in managing competitive intelligence than ever before were being offered around the world by individuals with strong CI research and practice backgrounds. Research in the field became more plentiful and mature as witnessed by the range of original articles appearing in places like Competitive Intelligence Review, Competitive Intelligence Magazine, AGSI Journal, and Long Range Planning. Popular books on the topic also increased in availability as an online search of Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com will quickly demonstrate.
Despite all of these advances and growth in CI, some areas of this burgeoning field have received more or less attention than others. The growth of digital communication and information technology, and especially the Internet, has led to much attention being given to processes and techniques of data collection. Planning competitive intelligence projects has also gotten a boost from the recent attention given more broadly to strategic planning. Despite these areas of popular interest, two areas that have received disproportionately less attention are analysis and its dissemination. In fact, survey research underlies the authors' contention that many practitioners have limited understanding of the breadth and depth of the challenge underlying these areas. It is our intention to begin remedying this situation by offering the first book devoted entirely to the management of competitive analysis.
This book comprehensively examines the wide spectrum of techniques involved in analyzing business and competitive data and information including strategic, competitive, customer, environmental, evolutionary, and temporal analysis models. It helps business analysts and decision makers to draw effective conclusions from limited data and to put together information that does not often fit together at first glance.
There are literally hundreds of strategic and competitive analysis techniques that we could have included in this book. It was not our intention to offer an exhaustive listing of the population of these techniques, assuming that it could be accurately done in the first place. Instead, we have extensively reviewed the literature in the field and considered survey research and our own experiences in determining those we view as potentially being the most applicable across a broad range of applications in the analysis process.
Although we have tried to include both classic and evolving techniques, we recognize that some techniques being used in consulting and industry may not be included here. Analysis is a process that requires both creativity and technical knowledge, and we have tried to provide a rigorous and systematic contribution toward the latter with this book. We recognize and hope that analysts will creatively develop techniques not included in this book that will provide for better outcomes in their specific contexts.
The reader should also be alert to the fact that any listing of techniques is bound to run into a variety of problems of semantics and definitional confusion. Some of the techniques included in this book are known by multiple names. This may have occurred because the technique came to be associated with a particular originating organization (e.g., the BCG matrix), a particular company's use (e.g., the GE business screen), a particular author (e.g., Porter's Five Forces model), or has retained a generic nomenclature (e.g., environmental analysis). We also recognize that some of the techniques included in this book have seen modifications in use over the years or are derivatives of other closely related techniques. In all cases, we have tried to include and describe the most popularly known versions of the techniques as opposed to all of a technique's possible derivatives. We have also tried to alert the reader to where there is overlapping between techniques by referring the reader to the overlapping constructs elsewhere in the text.
We must also note to our readers that it was not our intention to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to the analytical techniques. The techniques we have included herein all have a history. This book's techniques have been and are in use in real organizations; they do not exist just in theory.
Many of the included techniques were conceptualized by leading economists, financial and cost accountants, futurists, business professors, consultants, and other insightful practitioners or theoreticians. They often developed their ideas in an effort to solve pressing analytical problems that they faced. We are grateful to these individuals for enlightening our understanding of strategic and competitive analysis, and we make a sincere attempt to acknowledge the originators of these techniques in this book. Nevertheless, there are times when accurately making this acknowledgment can be difficult, such as when the technique (e.g., SWOT or TOWS) was quickly and widely accepted and now forms the commonly held body of knowledge underlying the domain.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
To assist our readers, the majority of this book is self-contained, with the array of analytical techniques being supported by references for further reading for those individuals that want lengthier treatments. The book is organized into two main parts. Part I provides an introduction that establishes the context for the comprehensive selection of analytical tools. As such, it includes several chapters that describe and discuss the basic facts about analysis, and how analysis relates to strategy and competitive intelligence. The last chapter in Part I describes our unique FAROUT(c) method for understanding the application of the various tools. We strongly recommend that readers thoroughly review it before progressing into the remaining sections containing the analytical techniques themselves.
We have tried to make the book easy for the reader to use. The basic structure of the chapters containing the analytical techniques is common throughout Part II and contains the following format:
- Short Description. A brief definition of the purpose and objective of the analytical model to allow the analyst a quick and handy reference guide.
- Background. To place the model in the context of management, this section outlines a broad description of the history behind the development of the analytical technique.
- Strategic Rationale and Implications. Understanding the strategic thinking and implications associated with a particular analytical technique is important in order to evaluate the appropriateness of a particular tool. This section reviews the strategic issues inherent in each technique.
- Strengths and Advantages. Each model has its own strengths and advantages that need to be weighed in light of the purpose of the analysis. This section briefly reviews those strengths and advantages.
- Weaknesses and Limitations. Likewise, each model has its own inherent weaknesses and limitations. The weaknesses and limitations identified in this section need to be taken into account when performing the analysis.
- Process for Applying the Technique. Typically the most detailed section of each chapter, this is the "how to" of the analytical technique and identifies the necessary steps required to use this tool. Case studies, figures, and tables are also provided to guide the analyst through the strategic thinking required for each model.
- FAROUT Summary. Unique to this book, the FAROUT Summary allows analysts, at a quick glance, to identify the ease of use, practicality, and usefulness of each model.
- Related Tools and Techniques. Each model of analysis is related to or supported by several other techniques that may aid or enhance the analyst's task. This section provides a useful guide of related tools and techniques that support the objective and purpose of each analytical model.
- References. For those analysts wanting to delve further into a particular technique, references for additional readings are provided at the end of each chapter. |
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