Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage ─ Through Executive Enterprise Leadership

In Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage Dhirendra Kumar shows how the Enterprise Excellence (EE) philosophy is a holistic approach for leading an enterprise to total excellence. It does this by focussing on achieving sustainable significant growth in revenue and profitability, reducing the business cycle time, strategically managing the enterprise risk and focusing on the needs of the customer. There may be various organizations within an enterprise but they must all focus on meeting or exceeding customer needs. Therefore, EE is an integrated approach affecting every employee, every functional area and strategy within the organization. Enterprise risk must be identified, assessed and prioritized; developing a growth strategy proposal which leadership has to execute in order to achieve goals. As business leaders spearhead the efforts, they must minimize, monitor and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events and maximize the realization of opportunities. The achievements in Enterprise Excellence can range from greater cost efficiencies, improved market perceptions, fundamental changes to markets, to new product and service offerings. There may also be significant upgrades in skills, technology, and business strategies. The scope of Enterprise Excellence can also range from operations activities, to business functions, to overall organization and to the enterprise as a whole. Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage is a comprehensive reference book for practising professionals, teaching faculty, and students alike.

Dr Dhirendra Kumar is retired from the North Carolina (NC) State University in the USA. He has worked as an engineer, technical adviser and program manager for Outboard Marine, John Deere, Pratt and Whitney, and Pitney Bowes. Since turning to academia, Dr. Kumar has been a researcher, senior lecturer, and visiting and adjunct professor, holding different posts at the universities of Iowa, Nebraska, Hartford, Central Connecticut and New Haven and NC State University. He has written books, instructional manuals, and many conference and journal papers and was a member of a number of advisory boards and scholarship committees. In his last assignment he advised undergraduate and graduate students on industrial projects and led projects in organizations external to NC State University.