Essential Advantage

Chapter 1: The Value of Coherence
Essential advantage and what it means for your business
How many books, frameworks, and consultants have you turned to in the search for the right strategy? How often have your strategies changed in an attempt to create value? How many times has your organization pursued new growth avenues or “white spaces", with an enormous amount of time and effort, and never quite getting the results you expected? How many initiatives have you started that didn't stick – or that never achieved their potential?
Most importantly, how many of these approaches to business success were isolated or fragmented within your company, ignoring or even undermining each other, simply because nobody had quite figured out how to fit them all together?
“We're searching for the glue," lamented the CEO of one of the world's largest consumer products companies when we met with him not long ago. He is not alone. Most senior executives would like their decisions to relate effectively to all parts of the enterprise, from customers to internal investments to product or service lines. And yet they seem to spend their time making choices and tradeoffs, balancing functional requests with business demands, all while putting out the fires that flare up constantly. They don't spend a lot of time on the potential advantage available to the enterprise as a whole.
This is a book about the nature of essential advantage in any business. As strategy consultants who have worked with hundreds of companies in defining moments of crisis and business transformation, we've been furnished with a rare window on what allows organizations to establish and sustain success over time. As a result, we have distilled what we believe to be the essence of advantage.
Your essential advantage is what your company does better than anyone else. When it is relevant to your ability to create value, it becomes the source of sustainable, superior returns. It's not what you have that matters; it's

Chapter Page
1 The Value of Coherence: Essential advantage and what it means for your business
2 The Elements of Strategy: Achieving a balance between your way to play, capability system and product and service portfolio
3 The Journey to Coherence: What to expect from a capabilities-driven strategy
4 Headroom for Growth: Leveraging capabilities to expand in your chosen markets
5 The Capabilities-Driven Deal-Maker: Why essential advantage matters in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures
6 Changing the Conversation About Costs: Expense ,management through a capabilities lens
7 Building Capability Systems: Assembling the right people and organization to support coherence
8 Living Coherence Every Day: Mobilizing the formal and informal organization for essential advantage
9 How to Develop a Capabilities-Driven Strategy: A four-step process for achieving coherence
10 The Capable Leader

Appendix 1 Measuring Coherence: Notes on our research

Paul Leinwand is a Partner in Booz & Company's global consumer, media, and retail practice. He serves as chair of the firm's Marketing Advisory Council. Cesare Mainardi is Managing Director of Booz & Company's North American business and is a member of the firm's Executive Committee. In 2005, Consulting magazine named him in its Top 25 Consultants list.

Named by strategy+business magazine as one of the Best Business Books of 2011.

“Few companies achieve a capabilities-driven “right to win" in their markets. This book will help your firm be among them." - Consulting Magazine