Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Bharat N. Anand; Stephen P. Bradley; Pankaj   Ghemawat; Tarun   Khanna; Cynthia A. Montgomery; Michael E. Porter; Jan W. Rivkin; Michael G. Rukstad; John R. Wells; David B. Yoffie

Class Lecture | June 2005 (Revised September 2008)

Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

by Bharat N. Anand, Stephen P. Bradley, Pankaj Ghemawat, Tarun Khanna, Cynthia A. Montgomery, Michael E. Porter, Jan W. Rivkin, Michael G. Rukstad, John R. Wells and David B. Yoffie

Abstract

It's great to have a blockbuster quarter or a revolutionary product or service, but true business excellence demands sustainability. Maintaining your competitive advantage requires a strategy that makes your business unique and carries you forward as the world around you changes. What makes a winning, sustainable strategy? Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage is a multimedia resource developed by ten faculty members in the Strategy Department at Harvard Business School. Included in this resource are faculty presentation, animated frameworks, print- and video-based case studies, and workbooks to help business leaders formulate action plans specific to their own companies.

Keywords: Competitive Advantage;

Format: Multimedia

32400 length of video

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"Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage." Harvard Business School Class Lecture 705-509, June 2005. (Revised September 2008.)

The case discusses the strategy of CIAM, a French activist investment firm, involved in a case of a buy-out of minority shareholders in the telecommunications sector. Altice NV, an international telecommunications company based in the Netherlands that owned more than 77% of SFR Group shares, made a bid for the remaining shares of France’s second largest mobile operator. Believing that the offer was woefully inadequate and constituted an abuse of power, CIAM had been fighting for a better offer as one of SFR’s vocal minority shareholders with a series of action plans—leveraging legal, communications, and public relations tactics. CIAM had just received a new piece of information, divulging a potential misuse of SFR corporate assets by Altice, and was discussing next steps.

We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India’s 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab managers aligned with the national R&D reforms raised patenting and multinational licensing revenues by 58% and 75%, respectively, and scientist research productivity, including a 16%, 10%, 11%, and 22% increase in h-indices, number of coauthors, publications, and citations per scientist, respectively. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques on the set of research abstracts produced among these scientists, we also find that overall mood and sentiment increased by 8.5% following the first managerial change.

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Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

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