"Nine Simple Rules for Better Business Strategy"
By Gary Gagliardi

All successful people have one thing in common: they know how to compete. Great competitors are not necessarily great in every aspect of business, but they know what really matters: winning. They have a special genius for creating great strategies.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be born a genius to understand competitive strategy. The nine formulas in this book make it easy.

Every day all across America, business people are making decisions without understanding the basic rules of strategy.   In this book, we have distilled the lessons of strategic thinking into nine simple rules.

Know How to Compete
You get nine powerful formulas in this book. These formulas teach you how to compete. They teach you how to see your business from the perspective of your customers, competitors, suppliers, and partners. They teach you how to create position that attract customers and discourage competitors. Using these formulas is as easy as baking a cake.

Success can be simple. You don’t have to be perfect. You only have to be better than your competitors.  Successful enterprises are not always excellent businesses, but they all do one thing very well: outmaneuver their competitors. Notice that we don’t say, “beat their competitors.” Among the many things most people don’t understand is that success isn’t about fighting battles and beating opponents. Fighting is costly, even if you win. Strategy is the science of leveraging situations to make yourself successful without fighting costly battles.

You cannot leap into a winning position any more than you can leap to the top of a building. You build a dominating position like building a pyramid, one block at a time. This book gives you a high-level view of strategy. Once you master it, this viewpoint is breathtaking.

What does this system of strategy entail? In the ongoing journey to bigger and better positions, your existing position is just your starting point. The techniques of strategy focus on advancing and building up that position over time. Success isn’t an endpoint in this journey. Success is maintaining and expanding your position. The nine formulas represent the nine steps you take, one after another, to advance your position. They offer the most powerful method for:

1. Comparing your position to competitors’ positions and potential positions
2. Building competitive channels of information
3. Identifying the best opportunities to advance,
4. Recognizing the restrictions on defending and advancing a position
5. Pursuing new opportunities without endangering your current position
6. Responding to the ways others are likely to challenge your moves
7. Creating momentum by leveraging the forces of change
8. Determining the real profitability of a new position
9. Defending a new position from competitive attack

We cover a ton of material here. No book every written about business strategy has ever made these ideas so easy to use. Every other business book tells a lot of nice success stories. This book doesn’t. Other books offer a few fairly simple, somewhat disconnected ideas about the ingredients of success. This book puts all those ideas into a comprehensive system.

What Makes this Proven System So Easy
As one of the world’s leading authorities on strategy, I have written a number of award-winning books and trained the world’s leading organizations. If you are curious about me, you can read about my training organization, the Science of Strategy Institute, and about my personal success. Though I have been very successful in the toughest competitive markets, I don't claim to have invented any of these rules.  Most of the rules in this book were first developed over 2,500 year ago.

My special talent is in making this rules easy for regular people to understand and use. At first I learned these rules myself and they made me successful. Then I began teaching them to my business associates and  they became successful. Then I began teaching them to the largest organizations in the world. Over decades of using and teaching the rules of strategy, I have refined them to their essential elements.

For example, the book's first formula, 9 Key Components, describes the parts that make up a strategic position. It puts your competitive position in a tangible form. The elements that define a position are not vague, subjective, or touchy-feely. It says a position consist of a philosophy, an economic base, a changing climate, a decision-maker, and certain key skills. These elements are solid and real—as solid as steel, as real as gold, but few people know all the trick for analyzing them.

The process of advancing a position is called the Progress Cycle. This process is described by the eight other formulas in this book. This process leverages the situations you encounter to improve your competitive position over time. It teaches you how to identify competitive conditions and respond to them appropriately.

The idea behind the Progress Cycle is simple. To advance your position, you must take advantage of opportunities. You do not create opportunities. You can only use the opportunities created by others, mostly by your competitors. To use an opportunity, you must exploit the weaknesses of your competitors. Once again, the rules are specific, clear, and easy to use once you know them.

These formulas are succinct. We don’t tell you stories about other people’s success that are inspiring but difficult or impossible to apply. We give you the steps for writing your own success story. The process makes obvious sense once you know it. This book is a recipe book. We call our recipes "formulas," but each one is just a list of ingredients and steps for putting them together.

Worth Thousand of Times What It Cost
This book only costs $19.95 (without the discounts we offer here). In this book, you get access to $197 worth of premiums: training and information from the Science of Strategy Institute that you can get nowhere else.  On those facts alone, you would it makes sense to buy this book.

But the real value of this book comes from the mistakes it will help you avoid. Most business people make thousands of dollars of easily avoidable (if you know these rules) mistakes every year.) For many business, these mistakes are fatal. Eighty percent of new businesses fail within the first two years. Seventy percent of the Fortune 500 disappear every couple of decades. When their well-proven methods go wrong, all their high-priced, experienced professional managers and consultants cannot figure it out and fix it.

For most businesses, finding success is like magic.  Magic formulas can always stop working for “no reason.” Real formulas work for clear reasons. In this book, we give you the real formulas that explain how dominant competitive positions are built.

Most business books oversimplify the complex businesses environment. Most business gurus reach into the complex cauldron of competition and pull out a few qualities that are sometimes important. But focusing on a few key pieces doesn't describe success. This book offers a different vision of competitive systems.

All systems are more than the sum of their parts. To compete, a business must be complete. If a single key part is missing, the quality of its other parts doesn’t matter. A business is like a bridge. 95% of a bridge is no more useful than no bridge at all and a lot more expensive. Completing a business is more than product development, marketing, sales, manufacturing, product delivery, and accounting. More than anything else, it is correctly positioning your business.

The science of strategy seeks to understand how competitors react to opportunities and challenges, how actions create responses, and how certain actions lead to success. In business, you not only have to think about what you will do. You have to think about how others will react to what. Like a game of chess, you have to think several moves ahead to be successful. That is what we teach you how to do in this book.

The nine formulas of strategy are simple ways of describing competitive fitness. These formulas describe what actions you need to take and how they affect the system. These formulas are precise ways of describing the interactions of relationships in the marketplace. Using these formulas, you learn to see your business in a new and more powerful way.

The dynamics of competition determine market winners and losers. You cannot simply copy another business because no two businesses can occupy the same place at the same time. You have to understand the forces shaping competitive positions. You find real success by making your life easier. If you don’t understand the forces shaping the winners and losers in business, you cannot harness those forces. If you fight the dynamics of the marketplace, you are doomed to fail. Strategy is knowing how to leverage the opportunities all around you.

You can start changing your life today but only if you act now
We make it easy. Our publisher, Clearbridge Publishing at the Science of Strategy Institute is offering this book at a 25% discount. You can get an additional 20% on top of this simply by entering the coupon code: 20%OFF.