Compete Smarter, Not Harder: A Process for Developing the Right Priorities Through Strategic Thinking

Praise for Compete Smarter, Not Harder "Dr. Putsis has made a valuable contribution to strategic thinking with Compete Smarter, Not Harder . He offers practical tools for helping your organization decide where and how to compete. These are the two critical elements of creating shareholder value: delivering what your customers really want and doing it better than your competition." —MICHAEL H. THAMAN, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Owens Corning "In a practical guide for managers at all levels, Putsis explains that the key to success is in the prioritization of the right markets and the right customers. This book offers a detailed process for making the right business decisions to compete successfully in today's business environment." —JOHN A. QUELCH, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School "The root cause of business success is discipline, and that is especially true in strategy development. This book lays out a disciplined framework that will allow today's leaders to identify the difference between a temptation and a genuine opportunity—this is the essence of winning and losing in a rapidly changing world." —MICHAEL J. CAVE, Senior Vice President at the Boeing Company and President of Boeing Capital Corporation "In Compete Smarter, Not Harder , Bill Putsis advocates a level of focus that requires strategic use of information to set smart limits. To keep their organizations competitive, leaders need to know—and sometimes embrace—their market's limits through strategic prioritization. Smart leaders first apply analytics to explore the boundaries of their market to uncover new opportunities. Then they make fact-based decisions at every subsequent turn. Businesses that fail often do so, not because their leaders didn't work hard enough, but because they didn't carefully choose where to compete. This book delivers the principles and tools to navigate those choices." —JIM DAVIS, Chief Marketing Officer, SAS

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: The Importance of Fundamentals Chapter 3: Finding the Right Market Opportunities Chapter 4: Managing the Risk of Growth Chapter 5: Choosing and Competing Effectively in the Right Space Chapter 6: Targeting the Right Customers in the Right Space with the Right Offering. Chapter 7: Understanding Your Customers in the Right Space Chapter 8: Vertical Incentive Alignment and “Asset Specificity” Chapter 9: Setting Tactics in Today’s Environment Chapter 10: What is so Different about Today? Conclusions and Lessons for the Future

DR. WILLIAM PUTSIS is a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School special-izing in the areas of Marketing, Economics, and Business Strategy. His scholarly work has been published in various journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Business, Journal of Business Research, Managerial and Decision Economics, Marketing Letters, Applied Economics, Journal of Forecasting , and the Review of Industrial Organization . He is also President and CEO of Chestnut Hill Associates, a strategic consulting firm he founded in 1995. The process presented in the book has been developed over the past two decades of working with organizations of all sizes including many leading Fortune 500 companies.