The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create It, Build it, and Use It to Maximum Effect

The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create It, Build it, and Use It to Maximum Effect
Price: $30.00 USD
A Silicon Valley veteran and author of the bestseller High Tech Start Up reveals the nature of unfair advantage -- that holy grail for every company, the mysterious quality that separates successful businesses from the nine out of ten that fail -- and then shows how to create an unfair advantage, build it into a business plan, and use it to maximum effect.

Nesheim's first book, originally self-published during Silicon Valley's wild west days in the 1990s, quickly moved from underground hit to business bestseller. He witnessed the incredible highs and lows of the Internet bubble, and he got an intimate look at why some companies weathered the storm while others went under. Now, in The Power of Unfair Advantage, Nesheim shows you how to bring the pioneer spirit to your new enterprise -- whether you are starting a new company or trying to breathe new life into an old dog. Unfair advantage is an enduring but often overlooked dynamic and a crucial aspect of any successful business endeavor.

To show you how to attain unfair advantage over your competitors, he begins with a clear model: Outsource everything you are not good at, concentrate on those things that can be differentiated, and strive for a unique, consistent difference that cannot be copied. Integrating these maxims with other essential elements, he demonstrates, with dozens of case studies, how to orchestrate unfair advantage through marketing, sales, engineering, and operations.

Unfair advantage can take many forms. Pager maker RIM rocketed to the top of the mobile wireless email market with Blackberry by employing an unfair advantage that it alone possessed -- pager technology and pager infrastructure. Alternately, an unfair advantage can come from a unique relationship with a strategic alliance partner, as when Flextronics pulled Handspring out of a life-threatening crisis.

The Power of Unfair Advantage is an essential handbook for every manager who is responsible for introducing a new product or service and every entrepreneur and would-be who plans to start a company. Unfair advantage is here to stay -- learn how to lasso its power, rise above the competition, and build a flourishing, long-lasting business.

Author: John L. Nesheim
Publisher: Free Press
Customer Reviews
  • Using it in my entrepreneurship courses
    Excellent book, I teach technology and creative entrepreneurship at the University of Edinburgh under the Edinburgh-Stanford Link programme. Most of my students are MSc or Ph.D.s in the arts and sciences. It has really helped explained how to build competitive advantage in the short and long term, and I consider this crucial as a learning for my students. I am using it during this academic year as an optional read for students; next academic year I plan to make it required. John was also a Professor of mine at Cornell (MBA) and is an excellent teacher as well, BTW. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />
  • This book is NOT "exclusively" for CEOs and the "power lunch" crowd
    Yes, there is an element of CEO / Venture Capitalist / etc. in this book, and while that crowd may constitute a large SEGMENT of the audience, there is valuable information here for sole proprietors, small business owners, and others. PERFECT example: Page 122, "Flanking." Nesheim discusses the need to roll out your product or service in an "uncontested area," stating "If there is an entrenched leader of the market you are planning on dominating, you are too late and have nothing to flank into...The only thing left is to try a better, faster, cheaper product for the existing market. But that has virtually no chance of winning." Anyone who passes this book by on the premise that it is for CEOs and their ilk is making a big, big mistake if they want to succeed in their own business. There are additional chapters on business development, marketing, sales...all written by a guy who witnessed "Silicon Valley" from the ground up. If more small business owners read well-written business books like this one, fewer small businesses would have "going out of business" sales.
  • A venture capitalist's perspective
    John Nesheim captures the essence of the foundation for success in high growth companies typical of the venture capital industry. "Unfair Advantage" is all about attractiveness to the customer and competitive advantage. In our VC investing practice at Canaan Partners, we constantly evaluate our current and prospective portfolio companies in terms of uniqueness and value proposition. John flushes out those notions and is right on the money. Required reading for all aspiring entrepreneurs.
  • If you want to learn from the BEST read this book!
    After reading this book it is very apparent that the concept of 'Unfair Advantage' is the single most important concept for anyone starting anything; whether it be a start up or a new product/project within an existing organization. <br />If John's first book successfully maps out what needs to be accomplished to successfully take an idea to an IPO, this book reorganizes all this info and more around the important concept of Unfair Advantage. His book is also a must read for anyone attempting to write a world class business plan. Implementing what I learned from Nesheim, I was able to get comments such as "one of the best business plans I've ever seen" from a top silicon valley VC partner. <br /> <br />I would like to personally thank John Nesheim for instilling in me the spirit of entrepreuneurship, and what I have learned from his teachings and books have been an invaluable help in taking me as far as I have in the world of high tech start up.
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