哈弗商务25.pdfVIP

Lecture Text Professor Pankaj Ghemawat Sustaining Competitive Advantage (edited for clarity) Introduction Sustainability has been a long-term preoccupation of mine. And the reason has to do with teaching strategy classes over twenty years and essentially getting responses from my MBA students, whose solutions to business problems often tend to be, “Well, come up with that world-beating technology,” or “Build that better mousetrap and surely that will take care of all of the competitive woes that afflict us.” And this is not a new insight. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing back in 1838, did in fact observe that if you build a new mousetrap, there will be throngs and throngs of people coming to your place even if you didnt operate a discount store. Building a better mousetrap And I got sufficiently irritated over the years by the better mousetrap as a solution to every problem and business strategy that I decided that I would go away and look at the real mousetrap industry to see if this is correct, even within the confines of that particular product. So I did a lot of research. I read magazines like Pest Control Monthly, which makes for a truly spectacular read. And a couple of things became very clear from the research into the mousetrap industry. The first thing is that there has been an enormous amount of innovation in the mousetrap industry. So, while most of us fortunately have limited familiarity with mousetraps, or are only aware of the spring-type traps, actually the modern design is not that old. They dont quite go back to time immemorial. And in addition to those, we have all kinds of wonderful new mousetraps that have been developed in the twentieth century. So there are repeating traps. If you have a particularly acute mouse problem, these things can check in multiple mice before you check them ou