Synopses & Reviews
This guide will help you become far more effective in crafting strategy that reflects the relentless external pressures you face, so you can shape your future instead of letting it destroy you. Leading business strategy expert Alfred A. Marcus offers powerful tools for anticipating technological, economic, political, and business change, and managing the threats and opportunities it poses.
Using incisive case studies, Marcus shows how to describe potential events leading from the present to the future, envision alternative positive and negative futures, and assess the moves you can make to prepare. He offers practical guidance for analyzing current strategy, challenges, customer and supplier bases, current and potential competitors, and possible short- and long-term substitutes for your offerings.
This guide helps you identify potential inflection points that can quickly destroy a flourishing business model or transform a high-growth firm into one that’s just “treading water.” You’ll learn how to incorporate major technological shifts, global security, economics, and sustainability in your analyses, reducing the risk of unexpected external shocks to the maximum extent possible.
Marcus demonstrates how to systematically assess potential responses related to product positioning, M&A, divesting, partnering, globalizing, and innovation. Finally, since businesses often ignore even the most compelling predictions, he addresses the challenge of getting your organization to take your analysis seriously – so you can act in time to win.
The Future of Technology Management and the Business Environment will be an invaluable resource for everyone who is (or will be) involved in planning or implementing business strategy, especially in technology-rich organizations and industries.
Synopsis
ANTICIPATE AND SHAPE TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION...INSTEAD OF BEING VICTIMIZED BY IT
Gain powerful insights for crafting strategy in technology-rich industries, from IT to finance, and healthcare to energy
Understand the massive social impacts of technology, and how today's societal divisions shape your opportunities to innovate For everyone who must manage new technologies and respond to technological disruption From biotech to nanotech to big data, the pace of technological disruption continues to accelerate. Now, leading business strategy expert Alfred Marcus offers powerful tools for anticipating technological change, and managing the threats and opportunities it poses.
Through insightful case studies, Marcus offers strategic advice for overcoming the pitfalls associated with deploying emerging technologies, or responding to others who use them to compete with you.
Marcus illuminates the ongoing interplay between technological change and wider societal trends, helping you recognize new opportunities created by these interactions, and maximize the upside-both for your company and the broader society.
Whether you're an executive or strategist, technical professional or MBA student, this guide will sharpen your focus on the future so you can navigate radical technological-driven change-
wherever it leads.
Emerging technologies offer immense promise for generating growth, profitability, and prosperity. But they face major obstacles to commercialization, and have environmental and social costs that must be carefully managed to maximize the benefit and mitigate the harm.
This book is about the foresight and strategic actions required for these new technologies to play a positive rather than negative role. Alfred Marcus illuminates their potential, reviews the risky decisions needed to transform potential into reality, and discusses how technologies might be used to ameliorate social problems rather than exacerbate them.
Marcus begins with insights about the strategy of technological innovation, using case studies to show why these innovations can fail, and offering methods for dealing with uncertain outcomes. Next, using examples such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he illustrates how to better manage the dangers associated with technologies. He then turns to technology's impact on three key societal conflicts: that between young and old, rich and poor, and the potential for scarcity and abundance in energy production. Finally, he focuses on how several pairs of companies, including Intel and AMD, Dell and Acer, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble, have managed technological disruption in their industries, and the difficult challenges they now face in overcoming these challenges.
Whether you're an executive, manager, or student, you'll gain powerful insights into innovation, strategy, execution, technology management, and the fastchanging business environment in which technological change takes place.
SOURCING THE NEXT SET OF BREAKTHROUGHS Exploring the horizon in information technology, medicine, genetics, energy, and materials
PRACTICAL BUSINESS LESSONS FROM TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURES
Managing the uncertainties and dangers of technological investment and deployment
SITUATING NEW TECHNOLOGY IN A COMPLEX WORLD How the social environment shapes technological impacts and opportunities
COPING WITH TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION: OPEN-ENDED CASE STUDIES
How enterprises have responded to technological change, and what they might do next
About the Author
ALFRED A. MARCUS (Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, MN) is Edson Spencer Endowed Chair in Strategy and Technological Leadership at the Carlson School of Management and at the Technological Leadership Institute (TLI) College of Science and Engineering University of Minnesota. There, he teaches courses in strategy, risk assessment, and corporate responsibility. Since 2006, he also has taught in the MBA program of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Professor Marcus’s research has been published by the Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Science, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, and other academic journals. He has consulted extensively with major corporations and received multiple government research grants. He is author or editor of 15 books, including Management Strategy, Second Edition, Strategic Foresight: A New Look at Scenarios, Winning Moves, and Big Winners and Big Losers: The Four Secrets of Long-Term Business Success and Failure. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Major Trends in the Business Environment
1. An Introduction to Technology and Strategy
2. Young and Old: the Issue of Global Security
3. Rich and Poor in the Global Economy:
4. Global Sustainability: Abundance and Scarcity
Part II: Companies Coping with Technological Disruptions
5. Intel and AMD
6. Dell and Acer
7. Amazon and Barnes and Noble
8. Best Buy and Target 9. Time Warner and Disney