Management Strategy: Achieving Sustained Competitive Advantage

Management Strategy: Achieving Sustained Competitive Advantage, 2e, by Alfred Marcus, is a brief, focused paperback text, allowing ample time for the instructor to incorporate other materials commonly used in this course, such as cases, readings, and/or simulations. The text focuses on how making winning moves depends on finding profitable patterns that repeatedly meet customer demands for solutions. Whereas many strategy books have lost sight of the purpose of strategy and fail to show how decisions actually affect business performance and, ultimately, outcomes, Management Strategy focuses on the types of analyses and strategic moves required, given the industry, environment, and a company's internal resources. In eight chapters, this textbook builds upon the analysis process and demonstrates how strategy impacts an organization's position in comparison to its competitors, both in terms of the cost and quality of its products and the scope of businesses in which it is involved (vertical and horizontal integration), as well as its global versus domestic reach. The outcomes that come from analyzing an organization also determine the extent to which the organization will strive to be an innovator as opposed to being a follower.