Staying power

Business news tends to focus on the travails of a handful of giants: Apple's iPad, the Toyota recall, the controversy over Google's book-digitization program. Whatever the day's headlines, though, most of these firms have been there before--up and down, written off and overpraised--yet they endured and triumphed. What is their secret? What is it that has lifted them to preeminence and allowed them to come out of each crisis stronger than before? In Staying Power, Michael A. Cusumano provides the answers. A bestselling business author and leading scholar, Cusumano has spent a quarter of a century studying the world's most successful companies--many of them from the inside, by serving as an advisor to more than one hundred firms. He identifies six critical principles that have driven the success of today's foremost companies, including Google, Intel, Apple, JVC, Toyota, and Microsoft. He argues that companies today must develop distinctive organizational capabilities, not just business strategies; focus on platforms and services, not just products; pull information from the market, responding to real-time changes in demand and competitive conditions, and not just push products out; a