Hypercompetitive Rivalries

In this pathbreaking book, Richard D'Aveni shows how competitive moves and countermoves escalate with such ferocity today that the traditional sources of competitive advantage can no longer be sustained. D'Aveni argues that a company must fundamentally shift its strategic focus. He constructs a compre-hensive model that shows how firms move up "escalation ladders" as advantage is continually created, eroded, destroyed, and recreated through strategic maneuvering in "four arenas" of competition. Using detailed examples from hypercompetitive industries such as computers, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals, D'Aveni demon-strates how hypercompetitive firms succeed by disrupting the status quo and creating a continuous series of temporary advantages.

With its emphasis on real-world experiences of corporate warfare, this abridged paperback edition of D'Aveni's masterwork will be essential reading for scholars and managers alike - a perfect introduction to the battlefield of hypercompetitive rivalries.

Richard A. D'Aveni teaches business strategy at the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College and consults for several Fortune 500 corporations. He received the A.T. Kearney Award for his research on why big companies fail, and has been profiled as one of the next generation's promising new management thinkers by Wirtschafts-Woche, Germany's equivalent to Business Week.