The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities

by Ram Charan

Overview

*A Wall Street Journal bestseller*

The forces driving today's world of structural change create sharp bends in the road that can lead to major explosions in your existing market space. But exponential change also offers exponential opportunities. How do you leverage change to go on the offense? The Attacker's Advantage is the game plan for winning in an era of ambiguity, volatility, and complexity, when every leader and every business is being challenged in new and unexpected ways.

Ram Charan, harnessing an unequalled depth and breadth of experience working with leaders and companies around the globe, provides tested, practical tools to help you:

Build the perceptual acuity to see around corners and detect, ahead of others, those forces — especially people, who are the catalysts of change — that could radically reshape a company or industry

Have the mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty

Commit to a new path forward despite the unknowns, positioning your business to make the next move ahead of competitors

Break the blockages that can hold your company back

Know when to accelerate and when to shift the short-term and long-term balance

Make your organization agile and steerable by aligning people, priorities, decision-making power, budgeting and capital allocation, and key performance indicators to the new realities of the marketplace

The Attacker's Advantage provides a stark and simple challenge: stay in a legacy world of incremental gains or defensiveness, or be an attacker by creating a new world, scaling it up quickly, ahead of the traditional players.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610394741
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	491,342
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author and speaker who has spent the past thirty-five years working with many of the top companies, CEOs, and boards of our time. In Ram's work with companies including GE, MeadWestvaco, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon, Aditya Birla Group, Tata Group, GMR, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, and Grupo RBS, he is known for cutting through the complexity of running a business in today's fast changing environment to uncover the core business problem or unseen opportunity.

He has authored fifteen books since 1998 that have sold over three million copies in more than a dozen languages. Execution, which he co-authored with former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy in 2002, was a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He also has written for publications including Harvard Business Review, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Time, Chief Executive, and USA Today.

Table of Contents

What Is the Attacker's Advantage? ix

Part I The Fundamental Leadership Challenge of Our Time

1 Bends in the Road 3

2 Why Structural Uncertainty Is Different 13

3 The Mathematical Corporation: The Algorithmic Revolution and the Rise of the Math House 19

4 Searching for Early Warning Signals 27

Part II Building Perceptual Acuity

5 Identifying the Catalysts of Structural Change 35

6 Seeing What Catalysts See 48

7 Tools to Build Perceptual Acuity 59

8 How Tata Communications Expands the Organization's Lens 74

Part III Going on the Offense

9 Defining the Path 85

10 A Mind-set for Offense 99

11 Kaiser Permanente's Path Through the Turmoil in Health Care 117

Part IV Making the Organization Agile

12 The Joint Practice Session: Transparency and Coordination 131

13 How Keurig Creen Mountain Adopted the joint Practice Session 149

14 The What, Who, and How of Decision Making: Zeroing in on the Organization's Critical Decision Nodes 156

15 Steering on Two Tracks 173

16 Merck's Quick Organizational Turn to Offense 195

A Final Word 213

Acknowledgments 215

Notes 217

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

12/15/2014
How can business leaders weather the consumer market’s constantly changing climate? Charan, business advisor and author of the best-selling Execution, instructs readers on the necessity of going on the offensive, particularly stressing the “perceptual acuity” needed to detect the next radical change before competitors do. Carefully outlined chapters make the case that companies must break free of internal constraints and acquire new expertise as appropriate, even at the cost of severing ties to past money makers. Drawing on 35 years’ worth of experience guiding top executives, Charan provides numerous concrete examples of companies, both within and outside the U.S., that have either succeeded or floundered under pressure. He also has firsthand knowledge, stemming from his business trips to his native India and to “emerging markets” elsewhere, of how quickly the ground can shift beneath a business leader’s feet in an economically developing nation. In light of this, he advocates embracing times of uncertainty, writing that only thus can a company create something “new and immensely valuable.” Each chapter concludes with a checklist of questions that succinctly summarize talking points and invite introspection, making this manual an invaluable resource for anyone navigating the market’s ever-changing but always taxing demands. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

*A Wall Street Journal bestseller*

"Coping with structural uncertainty and radical shifts in business models means executives need the insight to see around corners and the courage to move beyond boundaries. Ram Charan shows what it takes to go on the attack."—Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company

“An invaluable resource for anyone navigating the market's ever-changing but always taxing demands.” –Publishers Weekly

"[Charan] addresses the current turbulent business environment, cutting through the veil of complexity to concentrate on new customer needs and expectations and providing the tools for corporate leaders to take their companies to a higher level.”—Library Journal

"It is not enough for a sitting CEO-or any leader-to efficiently execute a successful strategy. As Ram points out you must be sufficiently alert to recognize early unfolding market disruptions. You need to be skilled not only in recognizing market changes but also in effectively transitioning the organization to exploit emerging opportunities. A must read for those leading companies in a tumultuous business environment." -Larry Bossidy, retired CEO and chairman of Honeywell International and coauthor of Execution and Confronting Reality

From the Publisher