Breakpoints: How Managers Exploit Radical Change

Many excellent companies have fallen from grace, not because they ignored their customers or lacked superior management skills, but because business conditions shifted beneath them. In an environment of fluctuating markets, proliferating technologies, and changing political frontiers, the management challenge is no longer to manage only growth. Now managers must cope with breakpoints, or sudden shifts in the rules of the game. In this timely book, Paul Strebel provides the first coherent approach to dealing with radical business change. Strebel shows that breakpoints may be as enterprising as Drexel Burnham Lambert's promotion of the junk bond market--or as dramatic as its collapse. They may result from changes in industry conditions such as the emergence of new technologies or price wars. When business conditions shift, the formula for success inevitably changes. Yet managers have difficulty anticipating discontinuities and only rarely do they exploit them. The book presents a new way of managing different types of radical business change.