COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into 'activities', or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Now an essential part of international business thinking, COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. That the phrases 'competitive advantage' and 'sustainable competitive advantage' have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

Now in its fourth edition, Blunders in International Business is significantly updated and revised, and full of interesting anecdotes, including dozens of new international business blunders. We often hear of business success stories; it seems that everyone is willing to relate past successes. However, unless these tales are absolutely incredible, we tend to forget them and consequently learn little of value. Mistakes, on the other hand, are seldom admitted, are easily remembered, and can be used to illustrate valuable lessons. In this new edition several well-known blunders from previous editions have been replaced in order to update the lessons learned. Expanded, but conserving its well-liked, concise format, it also includes more than fifty new international business blunders, featuring well-known corporations such as American Express, McDonalds, Toyota, GM, Sharwoods, Jolly Green Giant, Bacardi, Puff, AOL, BMW, and many others. David Ricks continues to uncover many informative, entertaining blunders that will make this book hard to put down.