There are two extremes in business competition today. Companies can play softball, relying on weak tactics that look like strategies but that actually do little more than keep the company in the game for the short term. Or they can play hardball—employing tough strategies designed to rout, not simply beat, competitors.
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In their book Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?, veteran strategists George Stalk, senior partner and managing director of The Boston Consulting Group, and Rob Lachenauer, a former BCG partner and now CEO of GEO2 Technologies, argue that business is about winning and losing, not about "playing nice." For too long, companies have focused on soft issues such as customer relations and corporate culture while ignoring the killer strategic instinct that has been the hallmark of winning since business competition began. Stalk and Lachenauer say that hardball winners practice the soft management skills, but always in the context of classic hardball play. They rally talent and build culture through a laserlike focus on the few "heart-of-the-matter" issues most critical to success. These companies play rough and they don't apologize for it—but they never break the rules, and they always keep their promises to customers and shareholders.
Drawing on their forty years of combined experience in advising and observing a range of companies, Stalk and Lachenauer show how hardball companies move beyond mere competitive advantage to achieve decisive advantages that neutralize, marginalize, and even punish rivals. Through rich, engaging examples that take leaders deep inside the world of intense hardball competition, the book reveals a cache of classic moves designed to catapult companies far out of competitors' reach. From exploiting anomalies to threatening competitors' profit sanctuaries to breaking industry compromises, the book reveals who uses these strategies, under what circumstances and in which industries each strategy is most effective, and how to execute each move successfully.
Today's global marketplace is the toughest and most unforgiving playing field business has ever seen. Hardball redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition in this new era—and outlines the classic strategies today's companies must use if they're in the game to win.
- The Hardball Manifesto
- Unleash Massive and Overwhelming Force
- Exploit Anomalies
- Threaten Your Competitor's Profit Sanctuaries
- Take It and Make It Your Own
- Entice Your Competitor into Retreat
- Break Compromises
- Hardball M&A
- Changes in the Field of Play
- The Hardball Mindset
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
George Stalk, Jr.
George Stalk's practice is focused on creating unassailable competitive advantage. He has consulted to a wide variety of companies throughout the world. Along the way, George worked and lived for more than a decade in Japan, where he first revealed time as a source of Japanese competitive advantage. To demonstrate the reproducibility of the Japanese strategy, George ran a client's factory in North America in which costs were reduced and quality improved significantly while throughput times were cut by a factor of ten. At BCG, these efforts led to the creation of a practice called time-based competition and to reengineering for speed as well as costs.
From 1998 to 2003, George led BCG's worldwide innovation efforts, managing initiatives focusing on almost all aspects of growth, e-commerce strategy, pricing innovation, and identification and exploitation of strategic discontinuities.
George cowrote the best-selling books Competing Against Time and Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation. His articles have appeared in many business publications, including Harvard Business Review, where one of his articles won the McKinsey award for being the best of the year. He was identified as one among a new generation of leading management gurus by BusinessWeek and as one of the top ten consultants in the world by Consulting Magazine.
George holds a B.S. in engineering mechanics from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Rob Lachenauer
Rob is president and CEO of GEO2 Technologies, an emissions controls company located in Boston. GEO2 has developed an innovated substrate for catalytic converters that reduces pollution, weight, and total system costs for both gasoline and diesel engines.
Before joining GEO2 Technologies, Rob was a partner at The Boston Consulting Group. At BCG, Rob's practice was largely with automotive and consumer goods companies focusing on growth strategies. Rob was the head of the North American automotive practice. Previously, Rob worked at Frito Lay in various marketing roles.
Rob earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Rob enjoys endurance sports such as marathons, road biking, and parenting.
John Butman
John Butman is the author, editor, or collaborating writer of more than a dozen books. For BCG, he collaborated with Jeanie Duck on the amazon.com business bestseller The Change Monster, with Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske on the BusinessWeek bestseller Trading Up, and with George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer on Hardball. In addition to his nonfiction books, which explore issues of business management and social change, he has published two novels, poetry, and numerous articles.
Before focusing exclusively on books, John spent 20 years as a communications consultant for clients around the world. He has helped corporations, private companies, educational institutions, and government agencies articulate messages, develop communications programs, and create communications materials of all kinds; his work has won more than 50 awards and citations. John is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
