The Spider's Strategy
28 Oct 08

In The Spider’s Strategy, Amit Mukherjee provides the necessary strategies and principles companies need to be competitive and resilient in the networked world.

This networked world in which business operate has resulted from the combined action of three key irrevocable trends: the decomposition of work across time and space (companies outsource design and production, while financial firms get money form multiple sources), an explosion in the variety of output (i.e., Dell sells a virtually infinite variation of computers), and the blurring of traditional demarcations between industries (pharmaceuticals and medical devices are converging, as have insurance, commercial banking and investment banking).

Mukherjee calls companies that are intelligently and effortlessly adjusting to the implications of these trends, Adaptive Businesses.

The Spider’s Strategy looks at successful Adaptive Businesses, like Nokia and Toyota, and draws from exclusive interviews with their top executives as well as a comprehensive study of over 500 manufacturing and retail companies. It then presents four design principles executives can use to transform their companies into Adaptive Businesses:

Embed sense-and-respond capabilities within normal plan-and-execute processes
The ability to detect a problem early and correctly and the ability to react effectively are key determinants of competitive advantage.

Adopt strategies that promote collaborative action among networked partners
Unless companies develop cooperative relationships with their partners, they will not get preferential assistance when either a crisis or opportunity arises.

Value and nurture organizational learning
Companies must collect, analyze, and share knowledge, across their networks, especially about what does and doesn’t work. When a crisis hits, they will be able to act decisively, and effectively.

Deploy technologies that enable intelligent adjustment to major environmental shifts
To adjust to changes in the marketplace successfully, companies need four key capabilities from technologies: to provide visibility, to support analysis, to facilitate collaboration and to enable mobility.

Each design principle helps improve a company’s effectiveness; collectively, they can give a company impregnable superiority. Indeed, Mukherjee believes that any solution to the current financial crisis must incorporate some variant of the four design principles, or risk total failure.

	Spider’s Strategy, The
	Author	Amit Mukherjee
	Pub Date	9 Oct 2008
	Price	£22.99
	Publisher	Financial Times/ Prentice Hall
	ISBN10	0137126654
	ISBN13	9780137126651
		Click here for further information or to purchase Spider’s Strategy, The.

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