Description
New concepts, analytical tools, and methods of managing continue to surface at rates that mandate important edition-to-edition changes in content. But whereas the topical additions and new treatments in prior editions were concentrated more heavily in the chapters relating to strategic analysis and strategy formation (because advances in the literature have for many years come faster in strategy formulation than in implementation), the most numerous changes in this edition are in the chapters pertaining to strategy implementation. In the interval since our last text revision, there have been revolutionary developments under way in the theory and practice of management. Books, journals, and the business press are full of research studies and reports about how companies are using new tools and techniques to revamp how they do business, streamline operations, restore competitiveness, and reach new heights of performance. Across the world, companies are reorganizing their work effort around teams, totally reengineering core business processes, instituting total quality management programs, competing on organizational capabilities (as much as on differentiated product attributes), and installing leaner, flatter organization structures.
In the other text chapters, you'll find new sections dealing with benchmarking techniques, value-chain analysis, competence-based competitive advantage, activity- based costing (which dovetails perfectly with value-chain concepts and strategic cost analysis), outsourcing of noncritical activities, vertical integration, and why strategy is partly planned and partly evolutionary and reactive. Once again, there's front-to- back coverage of global issues in strategic management and prominent treatment of ethical and social responsibility issues. Extensive rewriting to sharpen the presentations in every chapter has allowed us to include the new material and still cover everything in less than 320 pages-something that readers and adopters ought to welcome, given the jam-packed content of the course.
ISBN:9780256140552
