November 18, 1997
Media Contact:
Gry Moren
415-422-2687
Management Expert's Book Offers Five Steps to Market Leadership
SAN FRANCISCO - In order for business to stay afloat in today's "perpetual
state of whitewater," organizations must take five big, brassy, bold, and
occasionally bizarre steps, according to University of San Francisco
management expert Oren Harari. They must 1) catapult their strategy over
conventional wisdom; 2) flood their organization with knowledge; 3) wrap
their organization around each customer; 4) transform their organization
into a web of relationships; and 5) eat change for breakfast.
Harari discusses the steps in depth in his latest book, Leapfrogging the
Competition: Five Giant Steps to Market Leadership (American Century Press,
September 1997).
1) Catapult Your strategy over Conventional Wisdom: Harari believes
today's conventional wisdom becomes tomorrow's anachronism. Leapfrogging
organizations understand this, and capitalize on it by doing the
unconventional today.
"That is why these organizations find the courage to deliberately obsolete
their on-going products and processes, (especially those products that are
currently successes) regardless of what the competition is doing. For
them, everything their competitors are doing is a quick benchmark to be
noted," Harari writes.
2) Flood Your Organization with Knowledge: In a knowledge-based economy,
smart organizations will be the clear winners. Leapfrogging organizations
obliterate existing barriers to the flow of information so employees can
access the knowledge and people they need to in order to jump over their
slower, narrow-thinking, idea restricted competitors.
3) Wrap Your Organization around Each Customer: Leapfrogging organizations
understand that mass markets, standardized products and services are dying.
They believe they are in business not to build profit, but to build
long-term, constructive partnerships with customers.
4)
Transform Your Organization into a Web of Relationships: Leapfrogging
requires allies, and those who do it successfully rely on the assistance of
trusted, worldwide networks. They see their organization as an
ever-multiplying, virtual set of overlapping concentric circles as opposed
to the traditional heavy, massive, hierarchial pyramid.
5) Eat Change for Breakfast; Serve It Up for Every Meal: Leapfrogging
organizations not only embrace change as a business opportunity; they
mobilize to cause change. They scan the marketplace with healthy paranoia
because they fear the complacency that often comes with success.
Leapfrogging the competition becomes not just a figure of speech, but a
real and continuous event.
Oren Harari is a professor at USF's McLaren School of Business, where he
teaches global and strategic management. He is co-author of Jumping the
Curve: Innovation and Strategic Choice in an Age of Transition (with
Nicholas Imparato, Jossey Bass, 1994), and he writes a monthly column, "The
Cutting Edge," for Management Review. He was a senior consultant with the
Tom Peters Group from 1984-96, and is presently affiliated with The Futures
Group (Glastonbury, Conn.), and the Owner Managed Business Institute (Santa
Barbara).
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Gry Moren
News Writer
USF Public Affairs
(415)422-2687
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