Based on eight years of research visiting dozens of startups, tech companies and incumbents, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why consumer industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do about it—while highlighting the specific strategies potential startups use to gain a competitive edge. There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years. As Teixeira makes clear, the nature of competition has fundamentally changed. Using innovative new business models, startups are stealing customers by breaking the links in how consumers discover, buy and use products and services. By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn't compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves. Illustrated with vivid, indepth and exclusive accounts of both startups, and reigning incumbents like Best Buy and Comcast, as they struggle to respond, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain is an essential guide to demystifying how digital disruption takes place – and what companies can do to defend themselves.

Understand Michael Porter’s value chain in no time! Find out everything you need to know about this valuable business tool with this practical and accessible guide. The Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter has dedicated much of his career to studying competitive advantage. One of his best-known concepts is the value chain, which is used to deliver a product or service to the market and has three key objectives: to improve services, to reduce costs and to create value. The model can be applied to virtually any business in any sector, making it a vital tool for companies looking to make the most of their competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded market. In 50 minutes you will be able to: •Identify the nine functions that generate value within a business •Analyse your company’s activity to make the most of your competitive advantage •Find areas for improvement and take concrete steps to maximise performance ABOUT 50MINUTES.COM | MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING The Management and Marketing series from the 50Minutes collection provides the tools to quickly understand the main theories and concepts that shape the economic world of today. Our publications will give you elements of theory, definitions of key terms and case studies in a clear and easily digestible format, making them the ideal starting point for readers looking to develop their skills and expertise.

"Value nets are digital powerhouses that fuel business results."-From the Foreword by Adrian Slywotzky If you have ever ordered a computer over the Internet and been amazed that a product built to your exact specifications could arrive at your door within days, or if your business's competition is suddenly gaining share by delivering custom-designed merchandise faster and more reliably than you can, you need to read Value Nets. Enlightened managers around the world are learning that the supply chain can be a bountiful source of profitable growth, increased market share, and shareholder value. Value Nets: Breaking the Supply Chain to Unlock Hidden Profits shows you how to release the value hidden in supply chain operations through new digital networked solutions. Value Nets introduces you to a new form of business design built around superb supply chain performance in the e-commerce world. This design enables any company to do far more with the supply chain than simply control costs. It provides a basis for true differentiation in the marketplace and gives you the power to deliver first-rate service and customized products to customers in ways that delight them and keep them coming back for more. Using numerous powerful case studies and examples from companies that have adopted value net design-Gateway, Cisco Systems, Cemex, Biogen, Zara, and dozens more-the authors demonstrate how value nets bridge the gap between the executive culture of strategy and business reinvention and the operational world of procurement, manufacturing, and logistics. They introduce the new concept of value nets and offer compelling evidence of their outstanding results. They also explain the five elements of value net creation, supplying specific examples from companies that have built value nets and showing how the new design helped these companies achieve superior profitability and customer satisfaction. Complete with an appendix that helps you think through the applicability of value nets to your company, Value Nets delivers everything you need to understand and implement this remarkable new business design. It captures the creativity of today's most effective business model and puts its power where it will do the most good-right in the palm of your hand. As one of the world's premier corporate strategy firms, MERCER MANAGEMENT CONSULTING helps leading enterprises achieve sustained shareholder value growth through the development and implementation of customer-focused business designs. Mercer's thought leadership on the topic of value growth is evident in four agenda-setting books published in the past four years: Profit Patterns, The Profit Zone, Value Migration, and Grow to Be Great. The firm serves clients from twenty offices in the Americas, Europe, and Asia."Value Nets exposes the supply chain for what it really is--a strategic differentiator. Reading about the success of Apple Computer, Zara, et al., will convince you that the time to take action is now!"-H. Lee Scott, President and CEO, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. "Our experience is proof that the ideas presented in Value Nets work. Agile, networked operations help us deliver superb service to our customers and drive shareholder value as well."-James Mullen, President and COO, Biogen, Inc. "Value Nets takes supply chain management to the next frontier. CEOs will find it extremely helpful in their quest to provide better service and reduce cost by meeting unique customer requirements."-William "Gus" Pagonis, Retired Lt. Gen., U.S. Army Executive Vice President of Logistics, Sears, Roebuck and Company "Value Nets brings new concepts and a road map for competitive advantage to businesses in Latin America and other global markets where traditional supply chain thinking controls business design."-Julio A. Barea, President and CEO, Sara Lee Branded Apparel, Latin America Group

An expert offers a set of rules that will help managers achieve dramatic improvements in operations performance. In recent years, management gurus have urged businesses to adopt such strategies as just-in-time, lean manufacturing, offshoring, and frequent deliveries to retail outlets. But today, these much-touted strategies may be risky. Global financial turmoil, rising labor costs in developing countries, and huge volatility in the price of oil and other commodities can disrupt a company's entire supply chain and threaten its ability to compete. In Operations Rules, David Simchi-Levi identifies the crucial element in a company's success: the link between the value it provides its customers and its operations strategies. And he offers a set of scientifically and empirically based rules that management can follow to achieve a quantum leap in operations performance. Flexibility, says Simchi-Levi, is the single most important capability that allows firms to innovate in their operations and supply chain strategies. A small investment in flexibility can achieve almost all the benefits of full flexibility. And successful companies do not all pursue the same strategies. Amazon and Wal-Mart, for example, are direct competitors but each focuses on a different market channel and provides a unique customer value proposition—Amazon, large selection and reliable fulfillment; Wal-Mart, low prices—that directly aligns with its operations strategy. Simchi-Levi's rules—regarding such issues as channels, price, product characteristics, value-added service, procurement strategy, and information technolog—-transform operations and supply chain management from an undertaking based on gut feeling and anecdotes to a science.

Waste to Wealth proves that 'green' and 'growth' need not be binary alternatives. The book examines five new business models that provide circular growth from deploying sustainable resources to the sharing economy before setting out what business leaders need to do to implement the models successfully.

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.

In today's environment of tight budgets and even tighter turnarounds, effective supply-chain management has become a core business requirement. Managing the Supply Chain adapts the number one supply-chain book on the college market to examine how professionals can consistently turn supply-chain strategy into a competitive advantage. This results-based book examines the experiences of today's most accomplished companies to demonstrate supply-chain innovation at work in the marketplace.

Strong leadership is necessary to drive the transformational change required to build and apply digital capabilities across organizations. Digital transformation in the supply chain is a leadership problem first and foremost. This book draws out some of the key digital business strategies supply chain leaders must become familiar with as they take on the responsibilities of leading transformations within their firms. The central rationale of the book is to establish a clear business case for the performance shifts and opportunities of the Digital Supply Chain. The benefits of a digital supply chain for firms can be summarized as uniquely reducing the amount of trade-off between costs and customer satisfaction. The challenges, complexity, and management involved in transforming to a digital supply chain have slowed many firms in their implementation. The key to unlocking this value and advantage is a new, robust, and digitally aware supply chain leadership mindset. It will provide readers with a practical Digital Supply Chain Leadership Road Map that will accelerate actions in technology, analytics, talent and business models. The road map to digital transformation will step the reader through these critical dimensions and illustrate how they can support their own organizational transformation by developing greater levels of maturity. This book will be most valued by supply chain leaders in medium to large scale organizations, as well as consultants and academics interested in digital business and supply chain transformation. The book will also be valuable for students studying digital transformation, supply chain, and operations.

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right . Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.