The Strategy Machine: Building Your Business One Idea at a Time

by Larry Downes

Predicting a revolutionary age of disposable computing, a guide on how businesses can respond and succeed presents case studies and offers advice on developing and nurturing a strategic portfolio... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0066211298
• ISBN13: 9780066211299
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Collins
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Super tools for applying the Killer App!

Are you prepared to adapt your strategies to the constantly changing future? Are you ready for the rate of change to speed up? The Strategy Machine by Larry Downes (author of Unleashing the Killer App), contains great conceptual tools for thinking about ways to re-invent your business in the face of the technological and globalization revolutions.It is clear that Downes wrote The Strategy Machine after getting a great deal more exposure to the strategic management process than he had when he wrote the classic Unleashing the Killer App. Where Killer App revolves around the central idea of organizations evolving towards success by destroying their own markets, fully a third of The Strategy Machine focuses on the greatest challenges of strategic change: overcoming cultural inertia and execution. This very likely comes from a close look at companies that, in the late 1990's, at least gave lip service to the revolutionary concepts in Killer App - companies that ultimately fell on hard times as the US economy bogged down on the twin disasters of the dot com bust and 9/11. In a sense, the book attempts to answer a question we will be hearing for years to come: Why did the 1990s juggernaut of self-destructive revolutionary companies slow down?The core of Downe's strategic thinking revolves around three stages that an industry can go through - each of which amounts to a separate "industrial revolution", despite the fact that elements of each may be occurring simultaneously within a given industry:1. Efficiency - Value is created through cost reduction with a full-bore attack on transaction costs.2. Exchange - Value is created through information assets which arise from "virtual markets" which expose hidden transaction costs and other inefficiencies.3. Emergence - Increased integration of the industry leads to an efficient "information supply chain"One of the core concepts of the Killer App - the technological innovation that disrupts an industry by restructuring the supply chain - is a clear target for companies that are seeking to ride the emergence wave. Strategically, we see this concept somewhat differently based on your perspective: if you are a young company, you are probably seeking success by driving this kind of disruption, but if your company is more mature, your strategy may revolve around how you can profit from disruption that may extinguish your current business model. The Strategy Machine does an excellent job of helping you to understand the concept of emergence so that you can be a part of the information supply chain - and therefore, one of the survivors in your industry. It then drives into some interesting prescriptions - always a tricky thing in strategy - which can help you think about executing on these concepts. First, Downes suggests that you design three concurrent plans for your strategy - one for each stage of industry transformation. The aim of these concurrent plans is to have a balanced portfolio of strategic p

Fascinating

A Must Read for the business executive. I found its advice to be enormously helpful in this particularly challenging time.