Ebook: Competing on Resources

How do you create and sustain a profitable strategy? Many approaches have focused managers' attention inward, urging them to build a unique set of corporate resources and capabilities. In practice, however, identifying and developing core competence too often becomes a feel-good exercise that no one fails. Collis and Montgomery, of Harvard Business School, explain how a company's resources drive its performance in a dynamic competitive environment, and they offer a framework that moves strategic thinking forward in two ways. The resource-based view of the firm comprises a pragmatic and rigorous set of market tests to determine whether a company's resources are truly valuable enough to serve as the basis for strategy and integrates that market view with earlier insights about competition and industry structure. Where a company chooses to play will determine its profitability as much as its resources do. The authors spell out in clear managerial terms why some competitors are more profitable than others, how to put the idea of core competence into practice, and how to develop diversification strategies that make sense. To illustrate the power of resource-based strategies, the authors provide many examples of organizations-including Disney, Cooper, Sharp, and Newell-that have been able to use corporate resources to establish and maintain competitive advantage at the business-unit level and also to benefit from the attractiveness of the markets in which they compete.