Summary

Management Strategy: Sustaining Competitive Advantage, 1st edition, by Alfred Marcus, is a strategy book which focuses on how making winning moves is dependent upon finding profitable patterns that repeatedly meet customer demands for solutions. Where many strategy books have lost sight of the purpose of strategy and fail to show how decisions actually affect business performance and ultimately, outcomes, Management Strategy focuses on the types of analyses the industry, environment, and a company's internal resources require to make effective strategic moves. In eight chapters, this textbook builds upon the analysis process and demonstrates how strategy impacts an organization's position in comparison to its competitors, both in terms of the cost and quality of its products and the scope of businesses in which it is involved (vertical and horizontal integration), as well as its global versus domestic reach. The outcomes that come from analyzing an organization also determine the extent to which the organization will strive to be an innovator as opposed to being a follower.