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

By John L. Nesheim

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1451624263
• ISBN13: 9781451624267
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

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. 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. 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.

A must read for any CEO or senior executive

John's latest book is a must read for any CEO or senior executive of an early stage company. It encompasses the most comprehensive recipe for an organization to gain a competitive advantage. I found the concepts covered to be very practical, actionable, and applicable to organizations of any size. Of course, one of John's passions has been eary stage companies, and therefore the book is the best I've read covering the process from founding of the enterprise, to developing of a busines plan, to securing funding, to executing the business plan - with a focus on building a competitive advantage from the ground up.

Neshiem does it right, again

I am a long time fan of John Nesheim, and I highly recommend this book. I was a student of his at Cornell, and this book does a great job detailing his lectures. In the early days of founding SightSpeed, I sought out John's advise with some cool new technology developed at in Cornell's engineering department. He listened to what we were looking at, and said (paraphrasing) "A technology is not a business, use the great technology as a way to build a business". That advice is was extremely important to getting our company off the ground and developing our business model. John expands greatly on that concept (page 163) and others in this book. Reading his book has been a wonderful reminder of the fundamental elements of developing our business. Now that I have finished reading it, I am making it mandatory reading for the rest of my management team.