Competitiveness and Death examines the increase and reduction of regulatory barriers to trade across three industries: environmental, labor, and safety rules on automobiles, consumer protection regulations on meat, and intellectual property regulations on medicines. The fundamental negotiation in trade and regulatory policymaking occurs between businesses, activists, and government officials. Gary Winslett builds on new trade theories to explain when and why businesses are most likely to lobby governments to reduce these regulatory trade barriers. He argues that businesses prevail when they can connect with broader concerns about national economic competitiveness. He examines how activist organizations overcome collective action problems and defend regulatory differences, arguing that they succeed when they can link their desire for barriers with preventing needless death. Competitiveness and Death provides a political companion to new trade theories in economics, questioning cleavage-based explanations of trade politics, demonstrating the underappreciated importance of activists, suggesting the limits of globalization, providing in-depth examination of previously ignored trade negotiations, qualifying the California Effect (the shift toward stricter regulatory standards), and showing the relative rarity of regulations used as disguised protectionism.

The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon act as gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars. We have the illusion of choice, but for most critical decisions, we have only one or two companies, when it comes to high speed Internet, health insurance, medical care, mortgage title insurance, social networks, Internet searches, or even consumer goods like toothpaste. Every day, the average American transfers a little of their pay check to monopolists and oligopolists. The solution is vigorous anti-trust enforcement to return America to a period where competition created higher economic growth, more jobs, higher wages and a level playing field for all. The Myth of Capitalism is the story of industrial concentration, but it matters to everyone, because the stakes could not be higher. It tackles the big questions of: why is the US becoming a more unequal society, why is economic growth anemic despite trillions of dollars of federal debt and money printing, why the number of start-ups has declined, and why are workers losing out.

Today's marketplace is seeing radical changes in the way companies do business with one another. New partnerships and alliances are constantly being forged, the lines between industries have blurred, and it has become difficult to tell one business from another, and who's competing with whom. The Death of Competition helps managers make sense of this chaos. Using biological ecology as a metaphor, it reveals how today's business environment parallels the natural world, and how, just like organisms in nature, companies must coexist and coevolve within their own business ecosystems. Through numerous examples, he explains the radically new cooperative/competitive relationships like the one forged between IBM and Microsoft and provides a comprehensive framework businesses can use to enhance their own collaborations with their customers, suppliers, investors and communities.

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.

Are we facing the death of reliability? Some believe this is the case, particularly when it comes to reliability leadership. Without qualified leaders, there can be no true reliability, and as such, companies are losing out on the one real competitive advantage available to them today. About thirty years ago, organizations would invest time and money in their employees to develop craftspeople. Nowadays, many companies use shortcuts to try to achieve reliability, often fudging numbers to make it appear that they are progressing in the right direction, or using abbreviated training rather than full apprenticeships to produce skilled craftspeople. Unfortunately, they're simply covering up the unreliability that causes them to lose ground and increase costs. The misguided shortcuts used to circumvent hard work and effort are eroding craft skills. There are three components that are the root causes of unreliability, and, if eliminated, will lead to reliability: 1. Improper Lubrication; 2. Contamination; 3. Improper Installation. Dr. Wright goes above the "what" and "why" of reliability found in other resources to offer the "how to" of reliability.

A straightforward framework for creating engaging and exciting business meetings Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life. In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch. “How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered. In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary. Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings. Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen. As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams and create environments of engagement and passion.

Now that product differences are rapidly and easily copied, or are perceived to be minimal, differentiating a company's products and services from the competition has become key to corporate survival. Marketing guru Jack Trout delivers a practical guide for businesses on developing powerful differentiation strategies.