Supplying you with a firm grasp of the roots of strategy, How to Outthink, Outmaneuver, and Outperform Your Competitors: Lessons from the Masters of Strategy explains how to develop the skills and strategies needed to compete in today’s volatile marketplace. It interweaves the classic works of the masters of strategy, such as Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, Mao Tse-tung, Niccolo Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and other renowned strategists. The collective insights of these legendary strategists span 2,500 of combative history and have survived meticulous analysis by scholars. Applied to current competitive business conditions, their time-tested rules and guidelines will prepare you to deal with such issues as: preventing competitors from disrupting your overall growth plans, protecting yourself from a rival’s take-over strategies, and strengthening long-term customer relationships. Whether you operate as a multinational firm maneuvering for position in a global arena, or a regional business fighting an everyday battle for survival, the foundational principles provided can reinforce your understanding and practice of strategy. The book defines the historical origins of strategy and supplies timeless insight into how successful leaders have implemented comprehensive strategy plans. It also explains how to: Maneuver out of risky competitive situations and into renewed market opportunities Establish a defensible position in a hotly-contested market Apply competitive business techniques to outperform your rivals Align competitive strategies with your organization’s culture Personalize a leadership style to maximize performance from your staff The book includes three special features: Strategy Diagnostic Tool—A structured system to help you assess your firm’s competitiveness before committing valuable resources. Appraising Internal and External Conditions—A comprehensive checklist to analyze those key factors that can determine the success of your business plan. Strategy Action Plan—A tested format that includes step-by-step guidelines to develop a personalized business plan. The lessons gleaned from military history and strategy can be indispensable in the everyday management of your people and resources. By tapping into the universal logic and historic lessons of strategy, you will fortify your ability to think like a master strategist and add greater precision to your decision-making—thereby allowing you to outthink, outmaneuver, and outperform your competition.

Look at any industry, in any market, and youll find the same attrition strategy playing out everywhere. Companies compete with one another in a mindless race to the bottom, matching feature for feature, which commoditizes markets and drives down prices and margins. Ultimately, no one winsnot even the consumer, as quality, service, and differentiation suffer. Yet there is another way: maneuver strategy. Maneuver relies on speed, agility, insight, and innovation to win the most in any market at the least possible cost. Unlike attrition, maneuver never seeks to attack an incumbent in head-to-head competition. Instead, maneuver uses reconnaissance and insights to identify weaknesses and uses three strategies (preemption, dislocation, and disruption) to attack those vulnerabilities. Using speed and agility, a maneuver strategist wins new spaces before competitors become aware of the opportunity or disrupts the well-laid plans and efficient operations of competitors. As the pace of change accelerates, as speed and agility become more important than size and strength, as new entrants disrupt existing markets, attrition strategy seems outdated. Maneuver strategy, with its focus on speed, agility, and innovation, is the right strategy for the new emerging markets.

Game-changing new strategies to outsmart, outmaneuver, and outsell your competition! Salespeople face fierce competition in their pursuit of winning deals. Differences in product features and functions get smaller by the minute and are not always meaningful to buyers. How do you stand out from the pack and not just land the account, but win deals at the prices you want? Lee B. Salz’s previous ground-breaking, bestselling book, Sales Differentiation, armed salespeople with strategies to differentiate both what they sell and how they sell it. Sell Different! provides a new component of Sales Differentiation strategy to help you outsmart, outmaneuver, and outsell the competition to win more deals at the prices you want. This book provides you with the tools you need to land new accounts and grow existing ones. The practical, proven strategies presented in Sell Different! include: How to defeat your toughest competitor (hint: it’s not who you think it is) An actionable 16-phase plan to reach and engage elusive prospects Finding more of your best clients (it’s easier than you think) Acquiring more referrals than you ever dreamed possible Virtual selling and how to harness its potential Neutralizing the fear of change that paralyzes buyers and kills deals Structuring pilot programs that advance your deals Identifying the critical person needed to win more deals at the prices you want Solving closing problems and fixing the real issue limiting your success Dissecting and resolving the most challenging sales objection — price! What 99.999% of salespeople don’t do, but should Expanding account relationships to explode revenue and lock out the competition How to address a major flaw when comparing salespeople with professional athletes And much, much more! If you are a salesperson, executive, or business owner who desires to win more deals at the prices you want, then this book is for you.

Sun Tzu Bing Fa™ Masterpiece: Mastering 360 Principles In Strategy helps you quickly master and practice all 360 strategy principles in Sun Tzu The Art of War™. Each principle is carefully analyzed and explained through business and social contexts so that you understand how this powerful wisdom is applied in the real world. Knowing how these strategy principles are applied in real-life situations will help you accomplish your mastery of Sun Tzu The Art of War™. Your strategy mastery will help you obtain your upper hand and gain your competitive edge so that you can conduct your life and your business with power. For more information on our business strategy books, business strategy planners, business strategy courses, and business strategy certification programs, visit our websites: www.JamesSonhill.com and www.SunTzuStore.com.

In Competitors, international strategy guru Liam Fahey provides a new integrated, comprehensive method for analyzing the competition. Called competitor learning, the method is the product of Fahey's 15 years of consulting, researching, and teaching competitor analysis in cutting-edge companies in the United States and Europe. It combines a system for identifying critical competitor data with a series of analytical frameworks to help you develop powerful strategic insights. Competitors teaches managers how to know their competition as thoroughly as they know their own organization, and how to use that knowledge to outwit, outmaneuver, and outperform rivals.

General Motors and IBM have been battered to their cores. Jack Welch, the chairman of General Electric, called the frenzied competition of the 1980's "a white knuckle decade" and said the 1990s would be worse. In this pathbreaking book that will define this new age of "hypercompetition," Richard D'Aveni reveals how competitive moves and countermoves escalate with such ferocity today that the traditional sources of competitive advantage can no longer be sustained. To compete in this dynamic environment, D'Aveni argues that a company must fundamentally shift its strategic focus. He constructs a brilliant operational model that shows how firms move up "escalation ladders" as advantage is continually created, eroded, destroyed, and recreated through strategic maneuvering in four arenas of competition. Using this "Four Arena" analysis, D'Aveni explains how competitors engage in a struggle for control by seeking leadership in the arenas of "price and quality," "timing and know-how," "stronghold creation/invasion," and "deep pockets." Winners set the pace in each of these four competitive battlegrounds. Using hundreds of detailed examples from hypercompetitive industries such as computers, software, automobiles, airlines, pharmaceuticals, toys and soft drinks, D'Avenie demonstrates how hypercompetitive firms succeed in dynamic markets by disrupting the status quo and creating a continuous series of temporary advantages. They seize the initiative, D'Aveni explains, by employing a set of strategies he calls the "New 7-S's" Superior Stakeholder Satisfaction, Strategic Soothsaying, Speed, Surprise, Shifting the Rules of Competition, Signaling Strategic Intent, and Simultaneous and Sequential Thrusts. Paradoxically, firms must destroy their competitive advantages to gain advantage, D'Aveni shows. Long-term success depends not on sustaining an advantage through a static, long-term strategy, but instead on formulating a dynamic strategy for the creating, destruction, and recreation of short-term advantages. America must embrace the new reality of hypercompetition, D'Aveni concludes in a compelling analysis of the potential chilling effect of American antitrust laws on competitiveness. This masterful book, essentially an operating manual of strategy and tactics for a new era, will be required reading for managers, planners, consultants, academics, and students of hypercompetitive industries.

From the spymaster and inspiration for the movie Argo, discover the "real-life spy thriller" of the brilliant but under-supported CIA operatives who developed breakthrough spy tactics that helped turn the tide of the Cold War (Malcolm Nance). Antonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics -- Hollywood-inspired identity swaps, ingenious evasion techniques, and an armory of James Bond-style gadgets -- that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB. As Russia again rises in opposition to America, this remarkable story is a tribute to those who risked everything for their country, and to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.