The End of Competitive Advantage Quotes

“Consistent, ongoing innovation and extraordinary closeness to customers is the only possible response.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Inherently, companies like ours are super agile, because we are not in control of our own destiny … We can only live off something that our clients have decided to do.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“spend more time with a specific set of must-have customers, disproportionate to the revenue they might account for at that specific point of time; taking on projects which might not give high margins initially, but might eventually become big;”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Pursuing a strategy in which it has explicitly told investors that it will sacrifice some margin to sustain strong growth, it doubles down on investments made to create a compelling result”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“managers with a different mind-set start to become more important, and the business needs to become part of the parent corporation.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“transition to mechanisms for getting to scale, fast. The business that has been protected from conventional disciplines (such as producing return on investment)”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“A farmer in Jhalsu village loses a whole day’s earnings if he goes to a bank branch, a couple of km away, for a simple transaction like depositing or withdrawing cash.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“It is all too common for companies to rush through this phase, curtailing the valuable learning of what the ultimate product or service might look like.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“and massive numbers of assumptions are tested.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“The goal is to convert assumptions to knowledge as quickly and cheaply as possible.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“increasing the value it offers to patients beyond the raw molecule rather than being a commodity producer of off-patent pharmaceuticals.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“It refuses to pursue business (even though there are big volumes to be had) that doesn’t involve value-added for its clients in some meaningful way, rather than simply benefit from labor cost arbitrage.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Infosys, for instance, is very focused on which types of clients it will serve and which it will not. The company focuses on high-growth industry segments and on the “reference” clients within them.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“And of course, customers are notorious for being unable to articulate a need until they are shown how it can be met.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“the “jobs to be done” perspective,3 “challenge-driven innovation,”4 or “needs-driven innovation”5—in which customer needs are inputs to a “growth factory,” as my colleague Scott Anthony argues.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Companies such as Google (and, historically, 3M) operationalize this theory by giving employees time at work to do whatever they want, without restriction or guidance.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“To be proficient, an organization needs a governance mechanism suitable for innovation (and usually separate from the planning and budgeting processes of the core business),”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“So before you let people blunder around reinventing the process every time someone gets the urge to innovate, it makes sense to understand it first.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“decline, downsizing, near death, desperation, bet the company, and revival that characterizes so many corporate histories (such as Nokia, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and many others).”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“The fundamental problem is that in a world dominated by those pursuing exploitation, the innovation process is light amusement at best, a dangerous threat at worst.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“A related theme is to leverage external resources to the extent that you can, rather than trying to complete an ecosystem all by yourself.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“The temporary or “disposable” organizational form is all around us, and it fits well with strategies of rapid prototyping, quickly capitalizing on opportunities, and being willing to exit fast.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“What we will see, increasingly, is a core of individuals who represent the long-term interests of the organization (its leaders and long-term staff) guiding the efforts of other people whose attachment is more episodic.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“The necessary resources are assembled to tackle a specific task or problem, and when the work is done the organization, such as it is, is disassembled and moves on to the next task.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Employees? Do you really need employees when firms such as Skills Hive or Adecco can provide you with skilled people in an on-demand way?”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“You might contract with an innovation firm such as Innosight or Strategyn to help flesh out the business parameters and operating model.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“We Have Not Yet Built Our Defining Product”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“[I]t would have been impossible to predict or plan how to develop TerraCycle so that it would make it to the place it stands today. The trick was to be ever vigilant in seeking opportunities and to be ready to jump on them if they felt right inside and consistent with our core mission, even before they could be well thought out.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business

“A more effective approach in uncertain environments is to allow resources to be invested only when uncertainty is reduced, a core principle of options reasoning.”
― Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business