Big Winners and Big Losers: The 4 Secrets of Long-Term Business Success and Failure

Preface

Companies that keep winning are rare. What maintains their momentum and accounts for their ongoing success? This book compares firms that have achieved long-term success with firms that have experienced persistent failure. It provides four secrets that explain why the winning firms have done so well. From the history of the winners, I extract the critical attributes that contributed to their performance. Each firm had a distinct pattern. Being a big winner means carrying out (i) a well-executed niche strategy that achieves a balance between (ii) agility, (iii) discipline, and (iv) focus.

Managing the tension among such attributes is not easy. Big winners bring together opposing traits. Other firms can imitate the individual traits of winning ...