In the early 1960s, after the onset of the jet age in commercial aviation, Pratt & Whitney, with a clear head start, had an almost dominant market position in the commercial aircraft engines market while GE lagged behind P&W by a fair margin despite of being a strong, capable & leading market player in the military aviation engines market. However, a GE engineer, Gerhard Neumann, was tired of losing to Pratt by then, and chose to shake things up and change the status quo effectively. Neumann, along with a team of GE engineers, created the GE1, a revolutionary aircraft engine demonstrator, by mating a huge diameter fan to a relatively much smaller, efficient engine core, which resulted in significant fuel efficiency gains, a key determinant of engine selection by the airlines.
The GE1, subsequently, became the building block for more than a dozen GE commercial & military engines over the subsequent decades and scripted & spearheaded GE's almost legendary comeback and eventual leadership of the commercial aircraft engines market with GE effectively outflanking, outmaneuvering and comprehensively beating Pratt & Whitney at its own game for decades to come, with revolutionary engines like the CF6, which virtually transformed the wide body aircraft market and is still in production after over half a century, and over a dozen other engines, including the legendary F110, which effectively got GE back into the fighter jets game from behind, and the iconic CFM56, which is the undisputable industry gold standard for engine reliability & performance in the narrow body aircraft market, even today. Further, GE Aviation's headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio was subsequently renamed to '1 Neumann Way', in his honor, and stays that way even today.
This is not a book about GE or any other, specific industry player but rather about similar strategy masterstrokes & tactical brilliance by companies and illuminated minds in commercial aviation, across the aircraft & engine OEMs levels on the industry's supply side, since the onset of the jet age, which disrupted the prevailing market dynamics effectively with game changer market moves and created a clear competitive differentiation as well as advantage, overmatch & a definitive edge for them and altered the course of aviation history forever. Further, it also traces & tracks some others, who got distracted & misdirected by blind spots & parallaxes and committed blunders leading to erosion of market shares, loss of dominant market positions and even exits from segments & markets altogether.
Full of practical lessons, insights and real-life examples in disruptive market strategies & tactics, and with commercial aviation as the perfect backdrop; it is quintessentially a strategy guide and playbook for market disruption, customized specifically for commercial aviation, while also being an honest & humble effort to pay tribute to brilliant minds from a bygone era.
If you are an Aviation enthusiast or professional with a passion for flight and are almost smitten by Strategy; then, this is the supersonic flight, back into time, you just can't afford to miss...
Hop-In!
