Product Description: The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design.Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game--defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time...read more

Product Description: What made Wayne Gretzky the greatest hockey player of all time wasn't his speed on the ice or the uncanny accuracy of his shots, but rather his ability to predict where the puck was going to be an instant before it arrived. In other words, it was Gretzky's brain that made him exceptional...read more

Product Description: Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company , journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M...read more

A Fresh and Important New Way to Understand Why We BuyWhy did the RAZR ultimately ruin Motorola? Why does Wal-Mart dominate rural and suburban areas but falter in large cities? Why did Starbucks stumble just when it seemed unstoppable?The answer lies in the ever-present tension between fidelity (the quality of a consumer’s experience) and convenience (the ease of getting and paying for a product). In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience–between the products we love and the products we need. Rock stars sell out concerts because the experience is high in fidelity-–it can’t be replicated in any other way, and because of that, we are willing to suffer inconvenience for the experience. In contrast, a downloaded MP3 of a song is low in fidelity, but consumers buy music online because it’s superconvenient. Products that are at one extreme or the other–those that are high in fidelity or high in convenience–-tend to be successful. The things that fall into the middle-–products or services that have moderate fidelity and convenience-–fail to win an enthusiastic audience. Using examples from Amazon and Disney to People Express and the invention of the ATM, Maney demonstrates that the most successful companies skew their offerings to either one extreme or the other-–fidelity or convenience-–in shaping products and building brands.

Uses records, letters, internal memos, and personal documents to provide a biography of the man who transformed the small Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company into the international giant IBM.

Analyzes the driving forces behind the booming communications industry, profiling such media titans as Viacom's Frank Biondi and Microsoft's Bill Gates, assessing each company's current position, and predicting the biggest winners and losers in the coming years. National ad/promo. Tour. (view table of contents)