Extractos do capítulo 7 do livro "How we compete"

página 139
"Do all companies respond to these fundamental changes in the same way? Do they have to do so if they want to do well?"

página 145
"Once we had collected the managers' responses' we examined whether all companies making the same products for the same markets came up with the same strategies. If they did, we reasoned, we would have confirmation of the "convergence hypothesis": the prediction that under common competitive pressures, businesses tend to gravitate toward the same set of best practices in organization and strategy. When instead we found different responses, we realized there could be at least two possibilities. We might be seeing lag, with companies who look different because they are failing to adapt to the new pressures of the global economy. And certainly we did find some laggards who fail unless they change. But the diversity we witnessed went far beyond this: It revealed a variety of strategies that companies use to compete successfully in the same industries. As I will explain, our conclusions after analyzing the data were that this diversity is not disappearing and that there is no convergence on a single best business model"

página 146
"Which industries, which products, which operations can survive and prosper in advanced countries? Which are condemned? These are the questions we started with. As we met with corporate executives in hundreds of companies in fast-tech and slow-tech industries, we began to see that the core strengths of innovative and successful companies are not located in the products themselves, but rather in the capabilities a firm possesses and develops for carrying out particular functions."

página 160
"We found many cases, in which the "same" good could be made either as a plain-vanilla commodity that producers all over the world could turn out or else bundled with valuable features."

página 164
"Commodity status is not inherent in things in themselves; in fact, almost anything that has value for people can escape commodity status if a company can embed in it properties that potential rivals find difficult to replicate. In making these valuable services and material objects, companies choose different functions in the sequence of operations that links product definition to sales."
"How we compete - what companies around the worl are doing to make it in today's global economy" escrito por Suzanne Berger e o MIT Industrial Performance Center