Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they dont have it. Startups shut down if they cant develop it. It is a strategy so powerful and an executiondriven mindset so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantagethey achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their hardball manifesto, authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group show how hardball competitors can build or maintain an enviable competitive edge by pursuing one or more of the classic hardball strategies: unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, devastate profit sanctuaries, raise competitors costs, and break compromises.Based on 25 years of experience advising and observing a range of companies, the authors argue that hardball competitors can gain extreme competitive advantageneutralizing, marginalizing, or even destroying competitorswithout violating their contracts with customers or employees and without breaking the rules. A cleareyed paean to the timeless strategies that have driven the worlds winning companies, Hardball Strategy redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition for a new generation of business players. George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer are directors of The Boston Consulting Group. Stalk is the author of Competing Against Time, the classic work on timebased competition.