Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? [Hardcover]

There are some good pointers that will be familiar to those who have studied strategy, but the authors' attempt to dress up existing knowledge using the "hardball" metaphor is just a gimmick.

The authors laud "hardball players" such as Dell, WalMart, and Toyota. These are the companies that pursue competitive advantage "with a single-minded focus." As if on cue, the "softball players" are trotted out -- those companies that "aren't intensely serious about winning." Wouldn't it be nice if it were this simple? The truth is that many businesses play hardball but lose anyway. Think about it.

The "hardball" sports analogy implies that the goal is to defeat one's competitors and, by doing so, win the game. As somebody who has built a successful business, experience tells me that this is not accurate. Truly innovative businesses learn how to change the game, or play their own game, and thereby deliver superior value and results. Defeating your competitor might be a by-product of success, but it is not the main objective. After all, Toyota didn't have to defeat BMW to become the powerhouse of the auto industry.

This book is too simplistic to be useful to anybody who already has a rudimentary grasp of corporate strategy.

Spend big bucks and hire The Boston Consulting Group to help you with your strategy . . . and what do you get? Hardball answers that question indirectly through sharing classic strategies for achieving competitive and economic advantage employed by BCG clients.

As a result, I think this book will be most appealing to MBAs thinking about working for BCG and potential clients who want to get a sense of what the outcome might be like.

For those who are well read in business strategy, this book will be a disappointment. It focuses on very little you haven't read or thought about many times before. Skip this book if you are in this category.

The strategies discussed include overwhelming competitors with superior resources (Frito-Lay versus Eagle Snacks), adjusting to take advantage of what customers want more of (more variety and better delivery from Wausau Papers), threatening competitors' sources of profits (Japanese auto makers go after the Big 3's positions in minivans and SUVs in North America), copy and improve on better business models (Batesville Casket applies automotive manufacturing techniques), encourage your competitor to retreat (attack the bottom of the market first in low margin categories and move up), refocus your business model on one set of advantages (CarMax), acquire others to build your strengths while making competitors more vulnerable (Masonite International), and change the nature of competition (get to low-cost sourcing earlier than competitors, secure low-cost assets sooner and play the Wal-Mart card carefully).

The overall metaphor for the book has its problems. If you play to win, you are playing hardball. Al Dunlap (author of Mean Business) was a hardball guy, but it didn't pay off at Sunbeam.

If I read past the words in the book, the concept they authors are advancing is one of being unrelenting in developing a strategy that creates a virtuous cycle of ever-expanding resources and advantages while creating a vicious cycle for competitors of ever-decreasing resources and advantages. "Keep 'Em Down" would have been a more accurate title for the book.

You will find scant information in the book about newer types of strategies, new forms of technology and new business paradigms. This book is about "rock 'em, sock 'em" competition among the industrial giants of the world.

I worked as a consultant and later as a project manager at BCG in the early 1970s, and I was struck that the kinds of strategies and clients described here have changed almost not at all since then. I do think Hardball better captures the classic BCG approach used in the early 1970s than any other book I have read published by the firm or its professional staff. Bruce Henderson would be proud of you!

From my perspective, I graded the book down for slight inaccuracies in places such as underplaying the legal risks in these strategies (the authors seem to think scaring off competitors with "signaling" is pretty risk-free), misstating some of the cases (did GM really crush Ford's ability to get investment grade bonds by pushing for zero percent financing? -- it looks more like mutual suicide to me), and praising more than was due in some cases (the Japanese car companies were very late to come into North America with minivans and SUVs). I also thought the metaphor got in the way of the message . . . rather than enhancing it.

In the words of author Gertrude Stein: "There's no 'there' there." I was very impressed with the first third of this book and then my interest in reading it simply fell off the edge of the table.

The book relies almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence to support its claims, and most examples aren't that well developed. Some conclusions are muddled or, in my view, considered "stretches."

One of my personal pet peeves is that this book is horribly edited. It is riddled with misspelled words and other grammatical nightmares. It was horribly distracting. It seemed like they almost rushed this book to print to coincide with the article in Fast Company magazine.

Even though it's only 159 pages, halfway through this book, I just couldn't wait to be done with it. I'm glad I checked it out of the library. I would have been p*ssed if I had paid $25 for it.

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