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These approaches are often the best that middle managers can come up with when leaders abdicate innovation. This is why companies are so prone to what Sherman calls feature replication and performance augmentation. But the real issue at most companies is the tendency for leaders to overdelegate the job of innovation and strategic renewal. They focus on customers and competitors, they have resource constraints, and they suffer from misplaced pride and overconfidence. Essentially, he writes, companies are like dogs, especially older ones: They are easily distracted, are prone to foibles, and find new tricks difficult to learn. Sherman offers an interesting list of reasons that “continuous disruptive renewal” remains the exception, rather than the rule. This is why Ford is once again just another car company: Every automaker in the world has copied its once-innovative business model, and Ford has yet to create another idea that is big enough (sorry, but an electronic liftgate on the back of an SUV doesn’t qualify!) to fuel profitable, breakaway growth. And their growth will eventually stall if those ideas are widely copied or made obsolete, and are not replaced with new ones. Each of these companies created strategies that enabled it to turn its big ideas into long-term profitable growth. In fact, having a big idea explains every success Sherman identifies, including Cirque du Soleil (staging a circus without animals), Costco (selling bulk packaged goods, but to members only), Netflix (renting movies by monthly subscription), Southwest Airlines (competing with bus, auto, and train travel), Swatch (positioning watches as timely, affordable fashion accessories), CrossFit (creating gyms for elite athletes), and IBM (serving as your corporate/IT partner). As Sherman points out, Ford’s strategy of “democratizing the automobile” with one model (the Model T) and one color (black) made on a moving assembly line and sold through third-party dealerships was a very big idea at a time when the market for the horseless carriage was limited to the wealthy. For example, the Ford Motor Company went from being just another carmaker in 1910 to being the market leader in 1920, with a 60 percent market share.
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The many success stories in this book tell us that the key to sustained, profitable growth is an innovative idea that solves an important problem with a novel solution. What’s left behind is an expertly trimmed tree of knowledge that brilliantly summarizes and integrates what’s been learned about strategy over the last 60 years. He saws off a number of dead branches, including the many prescriptions that emerged from the countless searches for excellence, greatness, and the secrets of success. Like a skilled arborist, Sherman prunes back the ungainly, overgrown tree that strategy has become since it entered the corporate mainstream in the middle of the last century. He writes that “most companies predictable…strategies within well-established business boundaries,” which over time “leads to a blurring of meaningful differentiation between companies competing on the same terms for the same customers.” Instead of by running faster, you “break away from the pack by redefining one or more of the boundaries that historically constrained industry behaviors” and by consistently renewing your product and service portfolios. Sherman argues that companies have to reimagine what they are and thus what they are capable of - hence the dog/cat imagery.
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And he does so by telling many fascinating stories of companies that found - and haven’t yet lost - the holy grail, among them JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, IKEA, and, inevitably, Apple. But in the most compelling business book on strategy this year, If You’re in a Dogfight, Become a Cat: Strategies for Long-Term Growth, Leonard Sherman assembles a convincing brief that the slowdowns companies face as they become successful and attract imitators are not inevitable.Ī faculty member at Columbia Business School and a career consultant, Sherman builds a persuasive case that it’s possible to achieve and sustain the great desideratum of business: long-term profitable growth. In the business world, conventional wisdom holds that market leaders eventually succumb to the law of large numbers, the law of competition, and the law of competitive advantage.