How Industries Change
16 March 2005
The Research Briefing series is conducted in partnership with Melbourne Business School and sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton, Blake Dawson Waldron and Rothschild.
Speaker:
Professor Anita McGahan is the Everett W Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Boston University and a Senior Associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard University.
She previously taught competition and strategy at Harvard Business School and was a visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2001, Professor McGahan was named by CIO Magazine as one of five international experts on the strategic use of technology.
“You can’t make intelligent investments unless you understand how your industry is changing. This may seem obvious but such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. To truly understand where your industry is headed you need to examine the long term context in which you do business. This means shutting out distractions from the business media and the pressure of short term competitive threats,” said Professor McGahan.
Professor McGahan is the author of How Industries Evolve: Principles for Achieving and Sustaining Superior Performance, which was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2004. She was also co-editor in 2004 of the 21st volume of Advances in Strategic Management, which deals with issues of industry change. She is the author of over 60 articles and case studies on strategic issues of competitive advantage, industry evolution, and financial performance.
Professor McGahan’s research focuses on models of industry evolution and the evolution of competitive advantage. Her academic publications include studies on healthcare delivery, brewing, consumer electronics, insurance and pharmaceutical industries. She has also conducted case studies on automobiles, wheelchairs, baseball, telecommunications, network software, airlines, pharmaceuticals, movie theatres, soft drinks, toy retailing, retail banking and high-pressure laminates.
Her large-scale statistical studies have investigated broad patterns in the performance of companies, such as the rate at which turnarounds occur, the importance of industry conditions to profitability, the conditions for persistence in profitability, and the importance of corporate parents in nurturing risky businesses. This research is distinctive in its emphasis on identifying empirical facts that reflect principles of competition and strategy that hold in a broad variety of situations.
Panelist:
- Mr Rick Jackson - Chief Executive Officer Personal Insurance, Insurance Australia Group (IAG)
Resources
- Video - please choose the format and speed desired:
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