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Business Models: A Strategic Management Approach |
Author: Allan Afuah
Published: 2003-08-22 |
List price: $63.80
Our price: $77.45
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As of: January 06th, 2009 07:44:03 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Busines Models: A Strategic Management Approach
Fast and in great shape. Well done. I will gladly buy from this seller again.
Frank
 A pricey business school textbook that didn't focus enough on its subject for me to like it much.
Early in this book the author tells us that business models are about making money. They are sometimes called business concepts or profit models. The author warns us to not confuse revenue models with business models. Revenue models are merely a part of a business model and describe how revenues are obtained, i.e., advertising, auction, markup, production, or subscription. On the other hand, business models are described by answering the following 5 questions:
1. What product are you going to make or what service are you going to provide? And how will you do it?
2. How will you generate revenues from what you make or provide? (revenue model) And how will you market what you have to offer?
3. What are your costs?
4. How will you price it?
5. Why will customers use you (or keep using you) rather than your competitors?
Business models are usually not all that hard to document. Take any store on the main street, in which you live and answer the above 5 questions about that company. Many of the answers can be found just by looking at the store while walking down the street. And some of the answers will require a little investigation or research. But the pieces of the puzzle will fit together not too long after the project was started. And what you will have is a diagram of an existing business at a specific point in time making a certain profit on a certain amount of gross sales.
Once armed with the documented business models for the competitors in the market you want to start your business, then you are in a position to create a business model for your new business so it will be able to compete with those competitors. And to actually transform your business model document into a real life business, then all you will need to do is write a 25-35 page sound business plan which you can then implement.
Now that I think I have adequately described what a business model is (and is not) I have to say that much of the book does not stick to talking about business models. The book has 13 chapters, and I did not find the following five chapters to be relevant to the subject at hand:
2. Customer value and relative positioning
7. Executing a business model
11. Financing and valuing a business model
12. Business model planning process
13. Corporate social responsibility and governance
They covered customer analysis, business plans, business plan topics, and business ethics. None of which are directly relevant in a discussion of business models. They don't relate to any of the five questions listed after the first paragraph above.
And I did not find ANY of the cases in Part II of the book to relate to the subject at hand: business models. The case studies simply described certain products or services offered by various companies. It never dissected the business models used in these cases.
I had hoped that the author in this book would have dissected the following generic business models in detail:
>>Retail businesses
>>Service oriented businesses (part service and part product)
>>Product oriented business (part product and part service)
>>Personal service business (all personal services)
>>Distribution companies
>>Internet companies
But this book did not do what I had hoped it would. And unfortunately for me I still haven't found a book that does. All in all, this book was a disappointment. 3 stars!
 Wish it was one of my MBA textbook
The book has an overarching attitude to strategy. This book is the meeting point of many well known and intensively taught concepts in a way that make perfect sense.
This is one of few publications dealing directly with the term and concepts of the term business-Model.
The book is a great source for my Master Thesis.
Capstone
I read this book recently, just after my first year in business school. It provided a tremendous capstone to all of the major core fields here and integrates them naturally in the context of how a business should be looked at. There is a great deal of information compressed into these chapters, with a wide review of current thinking.I will unquestionably value this as a reference to remind me of the powerful lessons learned at b-school......
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