Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, Reutlingen University, language: English, abstract: At some point in time, business students around the world will most likely be confronted with the famous product and industry life cycle. This tool is mainly used as a marketing instrument. It offers advertising and investment directions for each of the three to five stages of the cycle. Everything in this theory seems obvious and clear, until the "decline" stage of the cycle is reached. The question is, is there really only one option, namely to harvest and then divest, in the last phase of the life cycle? Is the decrease in revenues and profits inevitable? The past shows that this is not necessarily the case. Some companies actually did generate profits and proved to be quite successful in a difficult market environment. Take for example the fountain pen maker Mont Blanc. The market for fountain pens has been declining for decades due to technological change (invention of typewriters and computers) and also consumer preferences. However, Mont Blanc has set up a selective shrinkage ("niche") strategy by attracting high-income professionals and promoting their fountain pens as a luxury good. As a result, the company has achieved stable revenues and high margins within a declining industry (Grant 2010). In the following, this paper will examine what a declining industry is, what characteristics a declining industry shows and what strategic options companies within such an industry environment have.

A collection which is part of the Open University integrated teaching system, this book is designed to evoke the critical understanding of students. There are readings covering the strategic management process, strategy formulation and managing strategic change.

Entrepreneurial Strategy aims to revive the debate on the role of entrepreneurship in the context of mature business. The authors contend that mature and declining industries are increasingly dominated by the negative pressure of external factors but they are also embedded with a potential renewed role for entrepreneurship because the industry forces as a whole tend to break up, leaving space for strategic business innovation.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

In this pathbreaking book, Michael E. Porter unravels the rules that govern competition and turns them into powerful analytical tools to help management interpret market signals and forecast the direction of industry development.

This is a reprint of a previously published book. It's original title was Strategies for Decliing Businesses.