Discover your company's essential advantage.

The conventional wisdom about strategy may be leading your company astray. In The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy, Booz & Company's Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with a coherence premium — a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.

Achieving coherence requires a sharpness of focus that few companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm's distinctive blend of strategic direction and differentiated capabilities that give you the "right to win" in your chosen markets.

Based on extensive research and providing a wealth of exercises, tools, and company examples from many industries — including Amazon.com, Walmart, Pfizer, Inditex (Zara), Itaú Unibanco, and Procter & Gamble —
The Essential Advantage helps you construct a strategically coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes.

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Among other insights, the authors reveal:

• Why you should focus on a system of only a few differentiated capabilities
  
• How to identify the way to play in your market by finding the nexus of your customers and your own capabilities
  
• Why you should manage your portfolio to fit your capabilities system
  
• How to raise your top line by deploying your capabilities for growth
  
• How to uncover surprising opportunities in M&A that conventional deal makers don't see
  
• How changing the way you think about costs can help you grow stronger
  
• How to rework your organizational structures and practices to become more coherent than your competitors