内容简介
Book Description
What's the secret to a company's continued growth and prosperity? Internationally known marketing expert Al Ries has the answer: focus. His commonsense approach to business management is founded on the premise that long-lasting success depends on focusing on core products and eschewing the temptation to diversify into unrelated enterprises.
Using real-world examples, Ries shows that in industry after industry, it is the companies that resist diversification, and focus instead on owning a category in consumers' minds, that dominate their markets. He offers solid guidance on how to get focused and how to stay focused, laying out a workable blueprint for any company's evolution that will increase market share and shareholder value while ensuring future success.
From Publishers Weekly
While he doesn't go so far as to say that small is beautiful, Ries (Positioning) levels a commonsense critique at the compulsion for growth that drives corporate America. Growth for its own sake, particularly when it involves diversification into products unrelated to a company's original business, Ries says, causes many companies to become unfocused, confuses customers and loses money. The frenzy for acquisitions that spread many a well-known brand name over a diversity of products has proved untenable, with the result that companies that grew fat are regaining their original focus by slimming down. Sears, Roebuck, a once focused retailer that expanded unwisely into real estate, stock brokering, business system centers and credit cards, is having to divest itself of all but its original retail chain. Managers seeking to focus or refocus their companies will find helpful examples here, drawn from a broad range of enterprises. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour.
From Library Journal
Ries, whose previous books were authored with Jack Trout, writes his latest with research assistance from his daughter. Together they go after the management of some of the world's most easily recognized firms, including PepsiCo and IBM. The authors use companies' experience as evidence that "focus" on the core businesses or products is the key to success in today's business environment, arguing that companies that remain focused, e.g., Volvo or McDonald's, have a substantially better track record than those that have strayed from their "core" businesses. This thesis, which is illustrated liberally with examples from the business world, is thoroughly developed. The reader may not always agree with the authors' statements, but they are well made and worth considering. For all management collections and for libraries that support all types of business, large or small.
Littleton M. Maxwell, Business Information Ctr., Univ. of Richmond, Va.
From the Publisher
The key to success in the 90s is focus.
Business has a new buzzword that has captured the imagination of corporate leaders everywhere. In the seventies, it was diversification, the notion that every company needed a counter-cyclic business to balance out its business cycle. In the eighties, it was synergy, the notion that a company could exploit the similarities between such products as magazines and motion pictures (Time Warner). In the nineties the word is focus and no one has preached the gospel of focus as long and as forcefully as Al Ries. In his bestselling book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, co-author Ries argued that focus is "the most powerful concept in marketing." Now, Ries has taken the focus concept one step further. In his new book, Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, Ries offers a bold and iconoclastic prescription for American businesses.
Managers have been driven by a series of strategies that have caused their companies to lose focus, Ries argues. The unexamined goal of growth-at-any-cost has led companies to invest heavily in the acquisition of other companies, the development of new, often unrelated products, and the cultivation of new markets and distribution channels - anything that promises new sources of revenue. Ries argues that bigger is not necessarily better and that the whole is frequently less than the sum of its parts.
Ries offers a staggering array of examples from a
| 出版社 | Harperbusiness Essentials |
|---|---|
| 作者 | Al Ries |