"Competition In The 21st Century: by Kirk W. M. Tyson"

In this book "Competition in the 21st century", author Kirk W. M. Tyson describes that competition will change radically in the 21st century. Business world will change with break neck speed and only those companies, which are capable of adapting to the change, will exist. "Evolve or Dissolve" will be the new business mantra and even larger companies than we have today will inhabit the business world.

The book describes the importance of "Competitive Knowledge Base" and "Perpetual Strategy Process" in the success of the Mega Strategic Business Units (MBE's). These MBE's will successfully make the transition from the Information Age of the 20th century to the Intelligence Age of the 21st century. By analogy, Tyson calls the competition to be 19th century Childhood, 20th century Adolescence and 21st century Adulthood. The MBE's will use economies of scale, integration of resources, services, and production capabilities and segmented marketing to exist in the fast changing business scenario.

The book enumerates the importance of "Competitive Knowledge Base", which is the development of a pool of information for future reference to the new information available. It will aid the decision making through an exhaustive and informative knowledge base .The book underlines that in order to relate to the present scenario it is essential to understand the past and by doing so we could avoid costly errors that have been made by others in a similar situation.

Business Intelligence (BI) will be enhanced through "Competitive Knowledge Base" and it involves the collection of information about all the factors external to the organisation. Thus this information when transformed into intelligence and intelligence into Strategic Development, will aid in making swift and accurate decisions.

"Perpetual Strategy Process" is a perpetual process, which involves the adaptation of the vision of the organization to the ever-changing world around. This is essentially a continuous process, which involves the fine-tuning of decision-making process to the environment and competition. Thus "One Year Planning Strategy" practiced presently would be useless as it would paralyze the organization to react to the opportunities available: -

The book also predicts that in the future, large organizations would not have organization charts but network charts that would include all those factors contributing to the output of the company.

De-centralization would be the key as those would make decisions closest to the customer.

The book also lists The Global Companies Of 21st century such as Johnson &Johnson, 3M, Electrolux, Sony, Matsushita & Motorola and Leaders Of 21st Century Hall Of Fame as Fujisawa of Honda, Theodore Vail of AT&T, Bill Gates Of Microsoft and Sam Walton of Wal-Mart.


The book mentions that the bottom line to successful competing in the 21st century would be to maintain a critical link between Intelligence and Strategic Management. Without this link, the companies are bound to be doomed.