The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy

by Paul Leinwand, Cesare R. Mainardi

Conventional wisdom on strategy is no longer a reliable guide. In Essential Advantage , Booz & Company's Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.

Achieving this clarity takes a sharpness of focus that only exceptional companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's blend of strategic direction and distinctive capabilities that give it the "right to win" in its chosen markets. Based on extensive research and filled with company examples—including Amazon.com, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Sons, and Procter & Gamble— Essential Advantage helps you construct a coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes.

The authors

· Why you should focus on a system of a few aligned capabilities

· How to identify the "way to play" in your market

· How to design a strategy for well-modulated growth

· How to align a portfolio of businesses behind your capability system

· How your strategy clarifies growth, costs, and people decisions

Few companies achieve a capability-driven "right to win" in their market. This book helps you position your firm to be among them.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 9, 2010

Reviews

[Felipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a bit ambivalent about this book. On one hand, it presents a great and distinctive framework for thinking about business strategy, one that I think every serious practitioner should know about. And presents it with enough texture that it's easy to understand step-by-step its key elements, how to apply them, and what makes them distinguishable. So the content is definitely brilliant, with concepts that are simple yet rich.

On the other hand, it definitely suffers from business-book-itis where there's a lot, and I mean a lot of text and stories surrounding the concepts... So your mileage may vary. I read it with a highlighter in my hand, and just the highlighted passages definitely became a 5-star book in my opinion!

You know what I would love? If Paul Leinwand took just the key concepts this book, Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap and Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future, combined it all together and created a "director's cut" of his trilogy. Just like The Hobbit, or There and Back Again works better as one book rather than three movies, I think this trilogy would also work much better back-to-back in a concise format.

[May Ling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary: The book delivers what it says it will, i.e. what is the capabilities driven strategy.

This is a straight forward quick read that is a good read for those trying to fit words into the idea that clarity of thought transfers to employees in a way that is necessary to get things done. I always love the helpful chars that are provided.

Part 1- The Coherence Premium - this is so important if you are going to think about what it means to really be clear on what it is and what it isn't. In this book are loads of great examples. I like that it talks about WMT and TGT but then poor Kmart is left without.

Part 2 - Book - the Managerial Revolution. I need to read this, but they give the example of Sperry Rand vs IBM. Tabulating computes sold great, but they were not the future. We should keep this example in mind as relates to the many changes that are happening.

p105 - I really liked the diagram. Have to think about it a bit more. They talk about the relative financial vs strategic value and what you should do with such endeavors.

Tables on P. 160-162 are great. They really describe the nature of certain very general, but relevant business problems and how to make coherent thoughts about them to describe to the team how to think about what you're solving for. Covid really hit a few of these and the winners and losers right now are showing this clear as day.

p. 183 He talks about reorganization of companies by geography by product group, but rarely in a way that improves coherence (a la toward the mission). That's not great.

[Adam McNeil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great supplemental read to the great strategy classics. Practical and academic, Leinwand focuses on the driving forces of accomplishing your overarching strategic direction by cutting nonessentials and investing in your core capabilities. Leinwand also offers an incredible critique of the BCG Matrix and offers a more holistic strategic analysis tool for dissecting your business. My critique is that he does not focus on overall mission/vision/purpose of companies as a driver of strategy and thus some of his conclusions are not applicable to a missional organization. Otherwise, I highly recommend this book as a supplemental source for anyone interested in Strategic Management (and you should be!).

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like any business book, it could probably be shorter, but the pattern of thinking offered to succeed in strategy is absolutely outstanding and I have used this framework numerous times. A *focus* on the 3-6 *most* important capabilities, combined with the understanding of your approach to the market and how that differentiated product fits customer desires is the heart of everything. Pick up this book to gain a simplifying view of strategy that can be very useful.

[Felipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

El desarrollo y configuración de Capabilities únicas es el camino para tener una ventaja duradera en el tiempo. Mi "Mantra" empresarial

[Alfonso · Rating 5 out of 5]

È un libro illuminante nel senso che mette insieme in modo organico e coerente (!) una serie di considerazioni e suggestioni che in parte avevo già sentito. Il quadro che ne emerge è molto interessante.

[Alejandro Restrepo Zea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helps to understand the coherence in the context of capabilities strategy and bring different point of view for focusing resources in each part of enterprise , the capabilities strategy give us a tools and roadmap that help to built coherence.

[N Shekar · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best strategy books that outlines a alternative thinking on how to build on your strengths rather than building new congruent capabilities.