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 | | Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth by Chris Zook ISBN-10: 9781422103661 ISBN-10: 1-4221-0366-8 ISBN-13: 9781422103661 ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-0366-1 Hardcover 2007-05-03 Harvard Business School Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Over the next decade, two out of every three companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition and facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today. Unstoppable shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the "hidden assets" that can be the basis for tomorrow's growth. Building on the author's previous books, Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, this book shows how any company in crisis can transform itself to become truly unstoppable. | ||
Reviews | ||
A guide to using assets you have but can't see. This is the concluding volume in Chris Zook's trilogy on the business core. The previous two books focused on supporting, exploiting and expanding your current core, whereas this book shows what you can do when your current core falters. Zook points out the high risks of defending your core until your company dies, or of jumping to the next new thing and getting it wrong. Then he shows you how to find and exploit your hidden assets. He uses many examples to illustrate his points in a compelling way. The approach is action-oriented and he provides many good questions to ask, lists to use in working things through, and some useful charts and graphs (but not too many). We recommend this book if you are thinking of taking on such a project: It will whet your appetite and motivate your team for what you are going to do. However, before you undertake something this complex and risky, you may want to enlist somebody like Zook who has the expertise to help you. | ||
A good book that stands on its own Normally the third book in a series either rehashes the prior two books, or requires that you read all three to understand the authors points. Unstoppable is unique in this regard as the book stands on its own and does not require you to read the other books. Zook talks in depth about how enterprises can find source of growth from the core of their company either by finding hidden assets, customers or capabilities. The strength of this book is its detailed discussion of each of these sources of growth from the core and extending the core. Zook also provides detailed tools to help the reader apply these ideas to their company. This is particularly unique in a book that addresses issues of growth and growth strategy. In some ways, Zook's book should be used as a companion to the book "BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY" which talks about identifying opportunities where there are no competitors. Used in combination, Blue Ocean will open up new possibilities, while Unstoppable will provide a way to execute on these opportunities and build off of your core to achieve them. The book is clearly written with detailed case studies and verbatims form actual companies going through their growth processes. This is unique for any business book and Zook's use of extensive interview comments makes the book seem real and actionable rather than academic. While Zook's book is well researched, there is a subtle and important bias in the research. Zook's results and statistics are largely based on analyzing projects that he and his company have conducted, rather than looking at the general marketplace. This is strength in that the book can talk about implementation details because they did the work. However, it is a subtle weakness in that the cases suffer from selection bias that has a tendency to color the results and conclusions. Zook's attention to detail, pragmatism, and exposing tools do compensate for this research weakness and for most it will not matter, but recognize that it is there. Overall, I would recommend this book for any executive who is looking to change their enterprise or recognize the need to do more in order to grow. This is one of the top 10 business books I have read so far this year so highly recommended. | ||
How to use the power of hidden assets to redefine your core business Chris Zook has written two previous books about paying attention to the core of your business and how to mine it for every dollar it will yield. This book talks about what to do when your core is beginning to falter. Rather than letting the rapid changing marketplace stop your company he suggests redefining your core. However, rather than leaping onto some popular bandwagon that has nothing to do with your present core, he advocates finding hidden assets within your company. He offers a process for understanding where you are in your strategic cycle, the Focus-Expand-Redefine (FER) growth cycle. Using this structure, he shows you how to know when it is time to redefine your core and the dangers of getting it wrong. Zook shows you what to look for in the way of platforms that you could promote from secondary status to become primary areas for your business. These might be technologies you acquired along with the purchase of a company, but it wasn't why you bought the company. It could be adjacent geographic areas, or markets that you could expand into without having to completely recast your company. Or it might be orphan products that you can use to exploit changing market conditions and the new opportunities they often create. I also agree with and enjoyed the author's emphasis on paying attention to the things your customers can teach you. If long term customers are leaving you they are being served by new competitors, new technologies, or are going out of business. You need to find out exactly what is happening. This also includes learning to segment your customer base as finely as possible. If you can learn to serve micro-segments of your customer base rather than having to treat them as if they were all the same kind of person, you will be able to develop those markets more fully. Your customers will also offer suggestions for improvements to your existing products and services, so pay attention. If you don't meet their needs, your competitors will. When they suggest new products to you, listen even more closely. The other place to find hidden assets are in your capacities. That is the ability your company has to execute and repeat value creating tasks at a high level of quality. You should inventory the dozens to hundreds of capacities your company has and then figure out which are the most critical. Those are your core capabilities. Are there other things you could use them for? Are there capacities that are important in supporting the core that could be recast to become core capabilities in their own right? I think this book offers some important food for thought. When you can work the FER cycle of growth you can become unstoppable, not because the old core doesn't burn out, but because you kindle and ignite a new fire to run your company's engine before it does. reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI | ||
'Unstoppable' - A contemporary approach to business strategy In an age of ever-shortening corporate life-cycles, Chris Zook examines the way in which some companies have successfully adapted to a harsher and more investor and public conscious corporate environment by expanding, redefining and reinventing their core businesses. As the future of large successful corporate conglomerates becomes increasingly uncertain in the wake of market forces, such as private equity buyouts, hostile or activist shareholder activity and other evolving market forces, which threaten to undermine long-standing successful market strategies, some companies somehow emerge from the shark-infested waters with little resemblance of their former selves and do so with greater vitality, profitability and vigor than ever before. Never before has one author caused a reader to re-examine the strategies that have shaped the global corporate atmosphere for so many years. Companies can no longer simply search for traditional market synergies among affordable competitors, or simply aim to lower production costs or hope to engineer a new product or discover a new market. Instead, these companies will be forced to seek out lesser known `hidden assets' in order to shift their core profit structure. They will also be forced to focus and refine that core and defend it vehemently against emerging low-cost competitors who seek to steal or infringe upon their core. Companies today will be forced to take actions such as these in their aim to become unstoppable, or they will inevitably suffer the consequences which more and more companies find themselves succumbing to. | ||
Pogo was right. In two previously published books, Profit from the Core (2001) and then Beyond the Core (2004), Chris Zook shares what several years of extensive and intensive research revealed about "how companies fail to recognize the potential of their core business and, as a result, prematurely abandon it in pursuit of hot markets or sexy new ideas, only to realize their error - often, when it is too late." He suggests a systematic way for organizations to assess their full potential and to make certain, also, that they do not fall into "this common, and typically human, trap." In this volume, Zook draws upon an even wider and deeper wealth of research sources that include about fifty interviews, mostly of CEOs. The title is explained by the fact that he and his associates chose to study most closely those companies "that beat the odds. We also analyzed patterns of failure and estimated the odds of success offered by various paths in various situations." He goes on to observe that all of the success stories built their renewal on their "hidden assets" that had been previously been undervalued, unrecognized, and/or underutilized. "These assets were not central to the strategy of the past, but they held the key to the future. Furthermore, the older and more complex the company, the greater was the likelihood of finding promising hidden assets." In other words, many companies already "hold most of the cards for "a winning hand" but do not realize it. I highly recommend all three of Zook's books because, together, they answer three separate but related, and critically important questions: 1. How to define and grow an organization's core assets? (Profit from the Core) 2. How to expand its boundaries into new territory? (Beyond the Core) 3. How to redefine and renew its core? (Unstoppable) No company is forever "unstoppable" but most (if not all) companies can take full advantage of the information and counsel Zook provides in this book to find correct answers to all three of these questions achieve core renewal without "leaps to distant and hot new markets, ...being the first adopter of a pioneering new strategy,...[or making] as `big bang' acquisition." In fact, unless a given organization has "beaten the odds" by sustaining profitable growth, it should first define or redefine its core assets and then grow or renew them, before committing any resources to organizational and/or territorial expansion. Zook is to be commended on the care with which he defines various terms. For example, undervalued business platforms "that might have once been secondary in importance but now have the potential to be the foundation for a new major core business"(e.g. IBM's Global Services Group). Also unexploited customer assets that tend to exist in three primary forms: "knowledge gathered as part of serving the customer but that, over time, accumulates an inherently greater value of its own...a unique position of trust of relationship with a set of customers [that gives] much more access and influence than has been recognized (e.g. American Express and Harman International). And finally, underutilized capabilities ("the most difficult hidden asset to discern but no less powerful") that result in losses of position to competitors in terms of cost, speed, logistics, design, and quality of customer service (e.g. the United States Postal Service's inability to invest as much as FedEx and UPS in system upgrades). "At the root of such competitive reversals we often find a yawning capability gap that was undetected, dismissed, or ignored." I especially appreciate Zook's skillful use of various reader-friendly devices such as check-lists that focus on key points covered within a chapter: "Seven Steps to Redefining Your Core" (pages 24-25), a "State of the Core Diagnostic" (Figure 2-3 on Page 44), "Detecting Undervalued Business Platforms" (Pages 82 and 83), "Identifying Hidden Customer Assets" (Page 115), "Defining Your Core Capabilities" (Page 140), and "Ten Principles of Core Growth and Redefinition" (Page158). These and other check-lists facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points later. Although hidden assets are the "real key" to redefinition and capabilities are "the building blocks of renewal," and I agree with Zook that they are, it is important to keep in mind that transformation and renewal initiatives should never end. Zook asserts that "the real focus of business should be external - on competitors, shifts in technology, and customer dynamics." However, ironically, for many companies now searching for profitable growth, some "of their most challenging demons are internal" and their "most difficult foes" are often themselves. Unless they identify and then leverage the hidden assets they already have or to which they have easy access, they will either be out-of-business or acquired by another company within the next ten years. | ||