Jobless rate at 14-year high… As home sales sag, foreclosures soar… Retail chains caught in a wave of bankruptcies…. Newspaper columns blare the news daily. There is no doubt that we are struggling through a worldwide economic and financial crisis of a magnitude not witnessed since the Great Depression.
In this environment, fraught with danger, no company can afford to take a wait-and-see attitude. One hesitation or misstep can result in the rapid demise of a once stalwart enterprise. Even small miscalculations can topple mighty empires – consider the U.S. auto industry, for example. The severity of the crisis demands that a company understands the causes, diagnoses carefully, implements decisively and monitors constantly.
However, the crisis also creates chances for companies that learn to assess risk, recognize opportunity and take action quickly. Beat the Crisis: 33 Quick Solutions for Your Company is an antidote to the chorus of doom-and-gloom, a manual for business leaders and employees who are ready to fight. In this book, international strategy guru Hermann Simon offers 33 practical actions that any company can take immediately.
Organized into broad categories: "Changing Customer Needs," "Sales and the Sales Force," "Managing Offers and Prices" and "Services," Simon shows companies how to focus on the areas where emphatic action can have quick and maximum impact on corporate performance. Drawing from dozens of successful cases around the world, Simon helps readers learn to read the market signals, develop quick solutions, and stay a step ahead of their competitors, while avoiding the pitfalls looming in the crisis. A concluding chapter looks beyond the crisis and considers the longer-term socio-political and business consequences, in which Simon foresees a new era of restraint.
Hermann Simon argues: "The 33 quick solutions won't rid the world of the crisis, but they can certainly contain the damage. And this can make all the difference between a company's death and survival."
Hermann Simon is the Chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners, Strategy & Marketing Consultants. He is an expert in strategy, marketing and pricing. Prior to taking on consulting full-time, he was a professor of business administration and marketing at the Universities of Mainz and Bielefeld in Germany, and has served as a visiting professor at many universities, including Harvard Business School, London Business School, Stanford and MIT. Named as one of Europe's most influential management thinkers, he has served on the boards of numerous journals and has published over 30 books.
Hermann Simon
Beat the Crisis: 33 Quick Solutions for Your Company
2009. IX, 159 p. 36 illus. Hardcover €24.95, $24.50, £22.99
ISBN 978-1-4419-0822-3
The author is available for interview.