Plan to Win: Analytical and Operational Tools: Gaining Competitive Advantage

"Plan to Win... in its second expanded edition delivers powerful, forward looking, yet easy to understand and apply analytical and operational tools for gaining competitive advantage. These tools demonstrate how one could have discerned at the end of 1999 from public source information that Enron was in a serious and declining condition - a significant negative inflection point - despite efforts by the company to keep material and significant items off its financial statements. This was a full year and a half before Enron's rapid demise. Learn how to determine if others are at an Inflection Point. See why (and approximately when) the Telecom downturn was predictable. Other tools show what trends and requirements future product solutions will have to follow in order to be market winners as well as how to determine market states, directions, trends, sizes, limits, and drivers. See why many companies today are not positioned to be winners tomorrow. Learn why these tools indicated Iridium and LMDS would not be market successes from the outset, despite many Third Party studies that projected huge opportuntities for such players. Simple top down and bottoms up analyses show how in a few minutes you could discern that many companies were grossly overpaying for the entities they acquired; from AT&T's cable acquisitions to certain wireless acquisitions through the recent 3G license auctions. Other tools demonstrate how you could have known from the outset that certain IPO prices would likely decline significantly and rapidly because of disclosed diverging gross margins - and have led you to the underlying causes of such divergence. Still other tools, based on sales and buy cycle analyses, show you how to develop more accurate forecasts and remove the "hype" from the numbers. This is in contrast to the massive downward, repetitive revisions in sales estimates seen in the market during 2001 and 2002. It is believed that the tools presented, if used wisely, properly, collectively, consistently, and in conjunction with other traditional analytical methods, should provide competitive advantage relative to your suppliers, customers, and competitors. So, Plan to Win!"John Nugent is the author of 'Plan to Win: Analytical and Operational Tools: Gaining Competitive Advantage', published 2003 under ISBN 9780072931617 and ISBN 0072931612.