New book by Cass academic aims to change existing mindsets about strategy

Shiv S. Mathur co-authors “Creating Valuable Business Strategies”

Friday, 18 January, 2008

A new book, “Creating Valuable Business Strategies” by Shiv S. Mathur, Emeritus Fellow at Cass, and the late Alfred Kenyon, former Visiting Professor at Cass, aims to change existing mindsets about strategy.

This book updates and extends the framework that Shiv taught to many cohorts of MBA students. It provides an innovative approach, rooted in customer choice, for setting strategic direction: choosing which markets to contest and how. It sees profitable business strategy as the task of designing each individual offering and also the collection as a whole. 

The authors make a strong case for treating the individual offering as the fundamental unit for business strategy. They suggest that each value-adding offering needs a competitive strategy: it must have a winning competitive position and also use one or more winning resources. They provide the reader with a classification of how an offering can be competitively positioned and also spell out the nature of winning resources. They then turn to corporate strategy: the task of managing the collection of offerings.

“Creating Valuable Business Strategies” challenges how strategy is taught and practised. It is targeted at anyone who is involved in designing tomorrow's offerings, from the backroom specialist to the CEO, in businesses big and small. It is accessible to students and practitioners alike, with a focus on practical implementation.

Commenting on the book Shiv Mathur said: “We wrote this slim volume because we wished to share with practitioners a framework that we developed over many years. In this book we have sharpened our ideas, honed them for practical use and expressed them as clearly as we can. We have also examined why a number of top managers may find some features of our approach irksome. We explain what can be done to resolve these tensions, but also why these features are nevertheless critical for setting a sound business strategy.”

To purchase your copy of “Creating Valuable Business Strategies” please visit the Elsevier website.