What’s Your Competitive Advantage? 7 strategies for running a more profitable business in a complex world , reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of What’s Your Competitive Advantage? 7 strategies for running a more profitable business in a complex world. By Cliff Bowman and Paul Raspin, co-authors of What’s Your Competitive Advantage?: 7 Strategies for running a more profitable business in a complex world, published by FT Publishing, priced £19.99

 What’s Your Competitive Advantage? offers a way to work with the realities of a complex world and the changing needs of your business. No-one can predict the future and we can’t predict the ultimate effect of any actions we take. What’s your Competitive Advantage? sets out an approach to managing change that reflects this complex reality. Built on insights from research into value creation and complex systems the book explains seven value creating strategies and the practices and change processes they require.

Built on insights from research into economics, strategy, organization theory and complexity science, you’ll discover a practical approach to creating value for your business in turbulent times, with advice on how to enable these plays with the structures, systems and culture of your business.

To be successful in business these days requires an ongoing ability to keep assessing if your business is relevant, and will remain so. It is too easy to sleepwalk from success to disaster as economic conditions and customers desires move ever faster. This book offers a thorough approach to assessing how to keep your business relevant and competitive in fast(er) changing times.

The concepts running through the book are well explained and presented in a logical fashion. Then the theory is supported by, on the whole, useful and insightful case studies. Space X among others is explained will, though the Ben Ainslie one was so short as to almost have been fortune cookie-esque in any insights it offered. We read it twice as we thought we had missed some pages, but no, it is just very / too brief. Thankfully the rest of the case studies are well presented and discussed in enough depth to provide meaningful and actionable insights.

Some say only the paranoid survive. Maybe this is a little too extreme, but as a book like this exemplifies, if you don’t stay on your toes, then someone else, hungrier, leaner, and faster moving will come in and eat your breakfast / and market share.

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