Summary on “ALWAYS A WINNER”

The title of the book is “Always a winner: Finding your competitive advantage in an

up and down economy”. And the author is Peter Navarro. The book was published in the year

of 2009 by Wiley-India publishers.

A recession can do far more damage to your organization than any of your ten

toughest competitors. Without question, this is the most important lesson that business

executives have all too painfully learned in the carnage of the 2007-2009 economic crash.

In a very pragmatic way, the book offers useful guidance to help companies survive and

thrive in the increasingly risky conditions of the twenty-first century, revealing how we can:

Forecast movements and key recessionary turning points in the business cycle, implement a

set of “battle-tested” strategies over the course of the business cycle, rebuild our organization

with a broader strategic business cycle orientation and make our organization more

recession-resistant resilient over the longer term.

  Navarro investigates how an organization can better assess the economic cycle in

order to subsequently prepare itself in a way that ensures a continuous advantage over the

competition. In Always a Winner, the successor to The Well-Timed Strategy from 2006,

Navarro develops his position based on quite a large amount of research that shows that a

recession does more harm than the ten strongest competitors. Interestingly, Navarro (or so he

claims) not only uses the same method as Jim Collins (for his book Good to Great), i.e.

conducting a pairwise comparison of, in this case, organizations who survive a recession

either strongly or poorly, but he also considers something that Collins has overlooked.

According to Navarro, truly ‘good’ companies has an excellent knowledge of economic and

financial market indicators and use this knowledge to actively manage the strategic business

cycle, which is the cycle in which the economy goes up and down in turns.

This means that they work in a countercyclical manner based on that information: 1)

reducing stock before the peak in the cycle instead of producing large quantities of products

for anticipated sales that never materialize and, as a result, not being left with unmarketable

products when demand collapses, 2) hiring extra staff before the low point in the cycle has

been reached instead of firing (more) employees, in order to be prepared for the upcoming

growth and enticing the best people away from the competition, 3) at the least, keeping

marketing and advertising expenses at the same level at before the recession, but spending in

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a more targeted manner, resulting in greater impact since the competition no longer

advertises, and 4) investing and taking over during the low point of the cycle, as this is when

the best bargains are to be had. Organizations that follow these recommendations are called

Master Business Cycle Managers and their ability to deal effectively with the strategic

business cycle ensures that they emerge from difficult times as the winners.

Navarro’s research shows that an organization must develop the following three skills

in order to become a Master Business Cycle Manager: Ability to predict the economic cycle,

ability to apply strategies for managing economic cycles in a well-timed manner and creating

the Master Business Cycle Organization. Navarro examines in depth the economic theory

that is necessary to become a Master Business Cycle Organization and does it in a way that is

also easy for a layperson to follow.

Navarro does not really closely examine the connection between the skill needed to

become a Master Business Cycle Organization and the results of other research into high

performance organizations (HPOs). As a result, it can appear that an organization only needs

to become adept in strategic business cycle management. But a company needs to not only

see the economic turning points approaching, but also have the ability to use them to its

advantage.

By learning to strategically manage the business cycle, an organization will be able to

create a powerful competitive and sustainable advantage over its rivals and thereby find the

grail sought by every executive team in the world-superior financial performance. In this

way, Always a Winner provides us with the in-depth insight and practical advice we need to

help our company sustain in the perilous economic conditions of the 21st century. I feel this

book beautifully demonstrates how to skilfully anticipate the ups and downs of the economy

and successfully navigate through them.

Submitted by:

Swarupa Rani Sahu

(F11116)

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