Book Brief: The Well-Timed Strategy

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

By Peter Navarro

Wharton Publishing, Feb. 2006

272 pages, $27.99

Business cycles come, business cycles go, and most IT executives invariably do the same thing: They react. Times are tough? Cut prices and fire people. Times are good? Raise prices and hire people. But by reacting—instead of anticipating—you are missing tremendous opportunities to grab profits and market share, argues Navarro, a business professor at the University of California at Irvine. He explains how to align all internal corporate operations to the business cycle so that you can hire better staff at lower wages in anticipation of a recovery, for instance, or time major capital investments to take advantage of both low interest rates and potential upturns in the market.