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To: Don Mosher who wrote (29340)	8/3/2000 1:12:11 PM
From: Jean M. Gauthier	Respond to of 54805

Wow ! what a post ! Congratulations ! Very ompressed Take care Jean

To: Don Mosher who wrote (29340)	8/3/2000 1:29:25 PM
From: areokat	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 54805

." Moore argued that the FFM is limited to use with mature companies because their technology, value chain, and market structures are established and stabilized, leaving only differences in company execution to influence competitive advantage, that is, leaving only execution to produce cost advantage and differentiation. (Author's note: Did you notice that Moore, in just the space of one paragraph, in his low-keyed style, so characteristic of intellectual arguments, just cut Porter's balls off! Moore just castrated Porter by slashing the power from his pair of major characters, "differentiation" and "cost advantage," which are his key classes of competitive advantage, as weak and company-centric in an Internet age. These eunuchs are only capable of guarding only the harems of mature companies who are about to get blind-sided by inevitable discontinuous innovations because they are living on the Fault Line in the Internet age. Don I don't really see his basis for doing this however, since Porter wrote in Competitive Advantage (on p.197) " Where there is technology discontinuity, the source of technology are much more likely to be outside the industry. "Technology discontinuity creates the maximum opportunity for shifts in relative competitive position.<b/> It tends to nullify many first mover advantages and mobility barriers built on the old technology." Having spent months reading Porter my sense is that his is a more all encompassing theory, a general theory if you will covering all industries and firm types. Moore's concentration is on a segment of an industry. Porter is writing in 1985 without benefit of Christensen's work on innovation (maybe?). I guess I'm pretty alone in my thinking but seems to me that Moore owes more to Porter's thinking than he's owning up to. I see Porter's work as the foundation of most all of Moore's thinking with Moore then applying it to a specific case (with excellent result I believe).Standing on the shoulders of a giant, so to speak. Your thoughts would be appreciated. Tom Hope I'm not banished for life.

To: Don Mosher who wrote (29340)	8/3/2000 2:24:07 PM
From: MarkR37	Respond to of 54805

Around my house we use the word "power" as a synonym to "remote control". "give me the power would you? I want to watch the game." gg

To: Don Mosher who wrote (29340)	8/3/2000 3:10:26 PM
From: tekboy	Respond to of 54805

OT The concept of "power" is one of the most elusive in the social sciences. True. It's the kind of word that we use casually and often, but that is actually extraordinarily difficult to nail down and quantify. There are two basic approaches to power, one material and the other relational. The first refers to the possession of certain types of assets or resources, which are in turn supposed to be useful in influencing other parties. Thus we might say "John is powerful" when we really mean "John is big and strong," or "John has the authority to approve or block mergers," or whatever. The second approach refers not to the possession of resources but to the actual ability to influence another party: in Robert Dahl's words, it is "A's ability to get B to do something it would not otherwise do." The first definition is useful until it is not--that is, it is useful to the extent that there is a clear connection between the possession of certain resources and the ability to influence a certain outcome. It's usually better therefore to avoid talking in broad general material terms--"John is powerful"--and instead speak as precisely as possible about the situations one has in mind: "John is so much bigger than I am that he can kick the crap out of me, so I will be inclined to hand over my lunch money to him in the schoolyard if he demands it." The second definition gets at the heart of much common usage and has many strengths, but oddly enough it turns out to be so fraught with theoretical and empirical difficulties as to be practically unusable. For example, it is extremely difficult to operationalize this definition, or avoid tautologies, or say much with it about the causal role of power factors relative to other things that might be at work in a particular case. So you end up talking about assets and resources simply because they are recognizable proxies for what you mean. Moreover, there are several so-called "faces" of power: the ability to win actual contests or fights, the ability to shape the agenda so that some things rather than others are fought about in the first place, the ability to avoid even potential fights by influencing another party's goals so they end up wanting the same things you do and thus have nothing to fight about. The bottom line of all this is that instead of getting hung up on the abstract concept of power, it's probably far more useful for us to concentrate on much narrower and more specific questions about actual companies or corporate dilemmas. tekboy/Ares@BWTFDIK.org PS those interested in exploring the power issue further might find the following useful: Robert Dahl, "The Concept of Power," Behavioral Science 2 (July 1957); David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); William Curti Wohlworth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, "The Two Faces of Power," American Political Science Review, 56:4 (December 1962); and John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), ch. 1.