01727 837760

Business Objectives

57. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 7)

Michael Porter’s third generic strategy in Competitive Advantage is focus. In some ways, differentiation (see the last post) and focus go hand in hand. They are both ways of setting yourself apart from the competition and appealing most strongly to a segment, but differentiation is focused on the product or service and looks to modify […]

56. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 6)

Michael Porter’s second generic strategy in Competitive Advantage is Product Differentiation. Product Differentiation is about your product being perceived as different from other competitive offerings. It may be that the difference is real – your product or service is faster, healthier, safer, more reliable, bigger, smaller etc. (If so, it is only relevant if these […]

55. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 5)

In Competitive Advantage, Michael Porter identified the five forces affecting market attractiveness and profitability which have been outlined in more detail in previous posts. These were Power of Customers, Power of Suppliers, Industry existing competition, the Threat of New Entrants and the Threat of Substitutes. From this analysis, Poter reasoned that there were only three […]

54. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 4)

Michael Porter’s book, Competitive Advantage, identified 5 forces that determine the likely profitability of a business, and we have discussed four of these in previous blogs, namely the Rivalry of Customers, of Suppliers and the level of internal market competition, representing forces internal to the market and then the threat of new entrants as the first outside force. The […]

53. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 3)

Having looked at Michael Porter’s first three forces from  his book, Competitive Advantage, the internal ones of Buying Power of Customers, Buying Powere of Suppliers and the existing Competitive Rivalry in the industry, we can now move on to the first external market force, the Threat of New Entrants. Some markets are inherently very difficult to enter, […]

52. Michael Porter and Competitive Advantage for Small Business (Part 2)

The third of Michael Porter’s Five Forces affecting market attractiveness  identified in his 1985 book Competitive Advantage is the level of Competitive Rivalry in the Industry. The degree of competition affects the price a service can command and ultimately the survival of the players in it. Porter was thinking of large national and global industries […]

50. Theodore Levitt interpreted for small business

Levitt was an academic, born in 1925, who wrote on many areas of marketing and business strategy, including possibly introducing the concept of globalisation. But his main claim to fame is probably an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review in 1959, entitled Marketing Myopia. This identified that most businesses were defining their market by […]

47. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 9

Peters and Waterman’s eighth and last precept for successful businesses in In Search of Excellence was to develop what they called ‘simultaneous loose-tight properties’. What they meant by this was, be very rigorous in ensuring that everyone understands and follows the key principles and objectives but give flexibility to enable exercise of creativity and initiative. It is […]

40. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 2

Peters & Waterman’s first theme which characterised successful businesses from their study of 43 ‘successful’ US businesses was: A bias for action. What they meant by this was that they were companies that did not generally feel the need to spend years studying any development and months contemplating any action. They tended to get on with it, and […]

32. Peter Drucker in his own words interpreted for small business 4

“Management is mostly to do with people, not procedures”. Those of you who have been following this series will have read about Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Scientific Management work. His mechanistic approach to efficiency (which focused on what is the most effective set of physical actions to complete a physical process) ignored the fact that […]

Page 2 of 3123

Quality Assured Member