Well Timed Strategy

Most companies ignore one of their best opportunities for honing competitive advantage: the opportunity to proactively manage business cycles and economic turbulence. Despite the profound impact that the business cycle has on the fortunes and fate of so many businesses large and small, and the employees and investors that depend on them, you will not find a single book that offers a comprehensive guide to strategically and tactically managing the business cycle. The Well-Timed Strategy shows you how to manage not just the business cycle and industry cycles but also today's unprecedented level of macroeconomic turbulence. Peter Navarro shows how to align every facet of business strategy, tactics, and operations to reflect changing business conditions, so you can ride with the business cycle, not get run over. Drawing on hundreds of examples from IBM to Disney, Navarro distills clear, simple management principles for managing economic upswings and downswings. Navarro addresses everything from inventory, production, and supply chain management to marketing, pricing, and long-term capital investment. Clear, concise, and exceptionally readable, The Well-Timed Strategy makes complex macroeconomic forecasting easy to understand and even easier to act upon. Profit from the chaos and turbulence of business cycle volatility! Discover how to proactively manage the business cycle rather than be victimized by it! Learn how to prosper despite recession, inflation, oil price spikes, exchange rate volatility, trade friction, and macroeconomic shocks. Specific strategies for managing inventory, production, supply chains, marketing, pricing, staffing, long-term capital investment, M and A's, and more."In The Well-Timed Strategy, Navarro provides a useful primer on business cycle risks and opportunities. Recognizing that business success depends most of all on human capital, he makes the crucial observation that the trough of a recession is the best time to find good people and the most important time to focus on retaining them. This and other insights about investment, production and marketing give todays executives a useful checklist for building and maintaining competitive advantage."--Michael Milken , Chairman, The Milken Institute