The Well Timed Strategy: Managing the Business Cycle for Competitive Advantage - Hardcover

"In The Well-Timed Strategy, Navarro provides a useful primer on business cycle risks and opportunities. Recognizing that business success depends most of all on human capital, he makes the crucial observation that the trough of a recession is the best time to find good people and the most important time to focus on retaining them. This and other insights about investment, production and marketing give todays executives a useful checklist for building and maintaining competitive advantage." --Michael Milken , Chairman, The Milken Institute

Most companies ignore one of their best opportunities for honing competitive advantage: the opportunity to proactively manage business cycles and macroeconomic turbulence. Despite the profound impact that the business cycle has on the fortunes and fate of so many businesses large and small--and the employees and investors that depend on them--not fa single book offers a comprehensive guide to strategically and tactically managing the business cycle. The Well-Timed Strategy shows how to manage not just the business cycle and industry cycles but also today's unprecedented level of macroeconomic turbulence. Peter Navarro shows how to align every facet of business strategy, tactics, and operations to reflect changing business conditions. Drawing on hundreds of examples, Navarro distills clear, simple management principles for managing economic upswings and downswings. Navarro addresses everything from inventory, production, and supply chain management to marketing, pricing, and long-term capital investment. Navarro presents examples from around the globe, ranging from Broadcom and Cemex to Paccar and Xilinx Chinese real estate developers to U.S. small caps. Clear, concise, and exceptionally readable, The Well-Timed Strategy makes complex macroeconomic forecasting easy to understand -- and even easier to act upon. Introduction xvii Chapter 1: Strategies and Tactics of the Master Cyclist Executive 1 Chapter 2: Countercycling Your Capital Expenditures 15 Chapter 3: The Acquisitive Master Cyclist Buys Low and Sells High 39 Chapter 4: The Art of "Cherry Picking" and Other Well-Timed Tactics of the Human Resources Manager 55 Chapter 5: "Macromanaging" Your Production, Inventory, and Supply Chain 75 Chapter 6: Master Cyclist Marketing Through the Business Cycle Seasons 95 Chapter 7: Pricing the Cycle and Managing Credit and Account Receivables 111 Chapter 8: Proactive Profiting From Oil Price Spikes, Interest Rate Hikes, and Exchange Rate Risks 129 Chapter 9: When You Can't Beat the Business Cycle, Hedge Its Risks! 149 Chapter 10: Surviving-and Prospering from-the Economic Shocks of War, Terrorism, Drought, and Disease 169 Chapter 11: The Master Cyclist's Favorite Forecasting Tools 185 Concluding Thoughts 211 Appendix A: The Master Cyclist Project's Treasure Trove of Data and All-Star Team 213 Appendix B: A Business Cycle Primer 223 Notes 233 Index 239