Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?

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Overview

Classic Strategies for Unapologetic Winners

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it.

"It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mind-set so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage— they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their "hardball manifesto," authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group show how hardball competitors can build or ...

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Overview

Classic Strategies for Unapologetic Winners

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it.

"It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mind-set so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage— they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their "hardball manifesto," authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group show how hardball competitors can build or maintain an enviable competitive edge by pursuing one or more of the classic "hardball strategies": unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, devastate profit sanctuaries, raise competitors' costs, and break compromises.

Based on twenty-five years of experience advising and observing a range of companies, the authors argue that hardball competitors can gain extreme competitive advantage—neutralizing, marginalizing, or even destroying competitors— without violating their contracts with customers or employees, and without breaking the rules.

A clear-eyed paean to the timeless strategies that have driven the world's winning companies, Hardball redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition for a new generation of business players.

Author Biography:

George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer are Directors of The Boston Consulting Group. Stalk is the author of Competing Against Time, the classic work on time-based competition.

Editorial Reviews

Entrepreneur
Overall, it's an unusually deep, fine-grained, and useful piece of business analysis.
—January 2005
The Economist
Hardball is already causing a stir.
—August 26, 2004
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Wall Street Journal
[T]he authors' message, eminently worth the read, is that you can succeed by competing relentlessly, intelligently and, yes, fairly.
—15 October, 2004
Soundview Executive Book Summaries
Master strategists George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer predict that business competition will become so fierce over the next 10 years that marginal victories and short-term advantages will not be enough to keep a company thriving. In Hardball, they explain that winning will require relentless strategic execution focused on turning competitive advantages into decisive advantages that neutralize, marginalize and even punish rivals.

The world of hardball competition is a place where the players are zealously committed to winning and relentlessly driven to strengthen their competitive positions, creating a virtuous cycle that puts them far out of the reach of competitors. Stalk and Lachenauer turn the experience they have developed during 25 years advising and observing a wide range of companies into a game plan for using hardball techniques. With these techniques, companies can achieve decisive victories over competitors - without bending the law or compromising their obligations to stakeholders.

Hardball presents detailed case studies of companies from many industries to outline seven hardball strategies: unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, threaten competitors' profit sanctuaries, take it and make it your own, entice competitors into retreat, break industry compromises, and hardball M&A.

The Hardball Manifesto
When companies play hardball, they use every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors. When they achieve competitive advantage, they attract more customers, gain market share, boost profits, reward their employees and weaken their competitors' positions. They then reinvest their gains in their businesses to improve product quality, expand their offerings, and improve their processes to further strengthen their competitive advantage. When they continue this cycle of activity for a prolonged period, they can transform their competitive advantage into a position even more powerful and desirable - they can achieve decisive advantage. They can use their decisive advantage to bring about fundamental change to an entire industry, put their competitors into a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still.

Five Hardball Principles
Hardball players live by the following five principles:

  1. They focus relentlessly on competitive advantage. Hardball players strive to continually widen the performance gap between themselves and competitors. They are not satisfied with today's competitive advantage - they want tomorrow's. They know what their advantage is and exploit it relentlessly. They don't deceive themselves or cheat. They measure their competitive advantage and differentiate theirs from their competitors.
  2. They strive to convert competitive advantage into decisive advantage. Decisive advantage is systemically reinforcing and puts you out of the reach of your competitors. The better you get at it, the harder it is for competitors to compete against it or take it away. For example, as you get bigger than your competitors, your costs go down further, enabling you to further your market share.
  3. They employ the indirect attack. Hardball players often avoid direct confrontation with competitors. "The indirect attack is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy," writes B.H. Liddell Hart, a military historian. "The most consistently successful commanders when faced by an enemy in a position that was strong naturally or materially have hardly ever attacked it in a direct way."
  4. They exploit their employees' will to win. To achieve competitive advantage, people must be action oriented and impatient with the status quo. Fortunately, the will to win can be fostered. But as your competitive advantage grows, it gets harder to exploit your employees' will to win.
  5. They draw a bright line in the caution zone. To play hardball means being aware of when you are entering the "caution zone" - the area of possibility that lies between the place where society clearly says you can play the game of business and the place where society clearly says you can't. Before you enter the caution zone, you have to know where the unacceptable area is and draw a bright line for your company that marks the edge, the limit beyond which you will not venture.
Copyright © 2005 Soundview Executive Book Summaries
—Synopsis

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781591391678
  • Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
  • Publication date: 10/28/2004
  • Pages: 175
  • Sales rank: 1,154,538
  • Product dimensions: 9.46 (w) x 6.42 (h) x 0.79 (d)

Table of Contents

1 The hardball manifesto 1
2 Unleash massive and overwhelming force 21
3 Exploit anomalies 39
4 Threaten your competitor's profit sanctuaries 55
5 Take it and make it your own 69
6 Entice your competitor into retreat 87
7 Break comprises 103
8 Hardball M&A 123
9 Changes in the field of play 139
10 The hardball mindset 153

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 8, 2006

    Inside exposition of winning strategies

    Being a winner in business means acting like a winner. That requires having an aggressive mindset, not settling for second best and recognizing opportunity. Not every company or executive has the stomach to play hardball. Kicking an opponent when he¿s down, reneging on a compromise or having to make decisions that your managers will hate is never easy. But the business landscape is littered with the skeletons of companies that settled for 'good, not great,' only to be blindsided by competitors who played for keeps. Authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer clearly believe that 'nice guy' and 'business leader' live in different worlds and although some of their 'hardball' tactics aren¿t all that tough or fresh, some clearly are. They say you have two basic choices: be the predator or the prey. We recommend this book to those who want to be the boss beast in that jungle out there.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 17, 2005

    Hardball my favourite movie of all times.

    I think this movie shows all the key points through life teaches you what gambling can do how you dont always get your way and that family and friends are always there for you no matter what. This movie is full of laughter and tears.. i would actually recomend this movie to anybody... This movie is heartwarming and will never let you forget the feeling in the end..

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 10, 2005

    Classic Strategies with Client Examples

    Spend big bucks and hire The Boston Consulting Group to help you with your strategy . . . and what do you get? Hardball answers that question indirectly through sharing classic strategies for achieving competitive and economic advantage employed by BCG clients. As a result, I think this book will be most appealing to MBAs thinking about working for BCG and potential clients who want to get a sense of what the outcome might be like. For those who are well read in business strategy, this book will be a disappointment. It focuses on very little you haven't read or thought about many times before. Skip this book if you are in this category. The strategies discussed include overwhelming competitors with superior resources (Frito-Lay versus Eagle Snacks), adjusting to take advantage of what customers want more of (more variety and better delivery from Wausau Papers), threatening competitors' sources of profits (Japanese auto makers go after the Big 3's positions in minivans and SUVs in North America), copy and improve on better business models (Batesville Casket applies automotive manufacturing techniques), encourage your competitor to retreat (attack the bottom of the market first in low margin categories and move up), refocus your business model on one set of advantages (CarMax), acquire others to build your strengths while making competitors more vulnerable (Masonite International), and change the nature of competition (get to low-cost sourcing earlier than competitors, secure low-cost assets sooner and play the Wal-Mart card carefully). The overall metaphor for the book has its problems. If you play to win, you are playing hardball. Al Dunlap (author of Mean Business) was a hardball guy, but it didn't pay off at Sunbeam. If I read past the words in the book, the concept they authors are advancing is one of being unrelenting in developing a strategy that creates a virtuous cycle of ever-expanding resources and advantages while creating a vicious cycle for competitors of ever-decreasing resources and advantages. 'Keep 'Em Down' would have been a more accurate title for the book. You will find scant information in the book about newer types of strategies, new forms of technology and new business paradigms. This book is about 'rock 'em, sock 'em' competition among the industrial giants of the world. I worked as a consultant and later as a project manager at BCG in the early 1970s, and I was struck that the kinds of strategies and clients described here have changed almost not at all since then. I do think Hardball better captures the classic BCG approach used in the early 1970s than any other book I have read published by the firm or its professional staff. Bruce Henderson would be proud of you! From my perspective, I graded the book down for slight inaccuracies in places such as underplaying the legal risks in these strategies (the authors seem to think scaring off competitors with 'signaling' is pretty risk-free), misstating some of the cases (did GM really crush Ford's ability to get investment grade bonds by pushing for zero percent financing? -- it looks more like mutual suicide to me), and praising more than was due in some cases (the Japanese car companies were very late to come into North America with minivans and SUVs). I also thought the metaphor got in the way of the message . . . rather than enhancing it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 12, 2005

    Very Well Written Book--Easy Read!

    I haven't finished this book but it's great if you're interested in a composition of cases and examples within a framework of various strategies. This is not a book that tries to solve your problems or give advice but if you can learn from well chosen, real-life examples, you will enjoy it.

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