Competitive strategy

How DuPont, GM, Standard Oil and Sears built the multidivisional firm.

Game theory without maths: look forward, reason back, and make threats credible.

Little-known mid-sized firms, mostly German, that lead world niche markets.

The deal is shaped before the table: set up the parties, interests and options first.

Media firms fail by fixating on content when value lies in the connections around it.

How value migrates between business designs in an industry.

How BCG, Bain and McKinsey created the market for strategy itself.

Bain's account of what founder-led companies lose as they scale.

Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

Rumelt's most important contribution is diagnosing what makes strategy bad — fluff, failure to face the challenge, goals masquerading as strategies. His kernel model (diagnosis + guiding policy + coherent actions) is the clearest framework for actually writing strategy, not just talking about it.

How to spot a strategic inflection point, when a tenfold force changes a business.

Strategy as five linked choices, including where to play and how to win.

Joan Magretta's accessible synthesis of Porter's body of work clarifies the distinction between operational effectiveness and strategy proper. Essential for anyone who found Competitive Strategy dense or wants the argument stripped of its academic scaffolding.

Harvard Business School doctoral dissertation series

The value chain: how to find where a firm's cost or differentiation advantage lies.

Edited volume

Edited HBR reader

How firms lead future industries by seeing tomorrow's chances and building skills.

Kawasaki on competing through service, speed and irritating incumbents

Game theory applied to business, which is cooperative and competitive at once.

Strategy as constant reshaping of advantage in fast, unpredictable markets.

Collected HBR articles; expanded edition 2008

Twenty-three profit models taught as weekly lessons from a mentor to an analyst.

How to create new market space instead of fighting rivals over existing demand.

Barriers to entry as the only durable source of a toll.

Creating Value-Based Competition on Results

How to spot a durable economic moat from public information, and what isn't one.

Little-known firms that lead the world in narrow product markets, and how they do it.

Why most media companies destroy shareholder value: few have barriers to entry.

Seven sources of lasting advantage, each a benefit plus a barrier to rivals.

Subtitled How Leaders Become Strategists