Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Dr Dhirendra Kumar is retired from the North Carolina (NC) State University in the USA. He has worked as an engineer, technical adviser and program manager for Outboard Marine, John Deere, Pratt and Whitney, and Pitney Bowes. Since turning to academia, Dr. Kumar has been a researcher, senior lecturer, and visiting and adjunct professor, holding different posts at the universities of Iowa, Nebraska, Hartford, Central Connecticut and New Haven and NC State University. He has written books, instructional manuals, and many conference and journal papers and was a member of a number of advisory boards and scholarship committees. In his last assignment he advised undergraduate and graduate students on industrial projects and led projects in organizations external to NC State University.

’Dhirendra Kumar has produced a new must-read addition to the canon of enterprise excellence literature. As a recognized expert in the field, he has outlined a holistic approach for leading an enterprise to total excellence under executive leadership. This book is essential reading for leaders interested in learning about meaningful and programmatic change towards a culture of excellence.’- Lukasz Mazur, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, USAThe book depicts clearly the various dimensions of globalisation and the dynamics of business ecosystem in terms of opportunities and risks and how the enterprise growth and risk strategies could be managed effectively to foresee, mitigate and convert risks into opportunities across the value chain. Author has taken efforts to map the elements in building competitive advantage, bringing out the imperative, to be continuously innovative, responsive, resilient and dynamic. These have been reinforced well by case studies at the end. These are the building blocks of enterprise transformation, which is inevitable in the new paradigm of sustainable competitive advantage and have been elaborated in further chapters. This would be of immense use to readers to get a holistic view of the enterprise and especially to gain insights into enterprise risk management, at strategy formulation and execution stages. - Dr Sundaramurthy Angappan, CMI Book Club

• 1. Introduction2. Enterprise excellence model; Enterprise growth strategy (EGS)3. Enterprise risk management (ERM)4. Enterprise transformation (ET)5. Strategy execution and measurement 6. Enterprise excellence case studies