Richard D'Aveni, JD, CPA and PhD, is Professor of Strategic Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, which the Wall Street Journal and Forbes have ranked as #1 in the world. He is Chairman of Tuck’s Strategy and Management Department, which the Wall Street Journal ranked #2 in the world. Professor D’Aveni offers two of the most popular strategy courses at Tuck: Global Strategy and Implementation, and Advanced Competitive Strategy, features 21 Fortune 500 CEOs as speakers during the 2007/8 school year. He has been mentioned in the same class as Gary Hamel, one of your other strategy finalists.

Thought Leadership

   Professor D’Aveni was recently named to the 2007 Thinkers 50 by the London Times, CNN.com, and The Times of India, a ranking of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world and he was named as one of the top ten strategic thinkers, as well. He is winner of the prestigious A. T. Kearney Award for his research on why and how large firms fail, and he has been a World Economic Forum Fellow attending the annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland. WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s Business Week, named Professor D’Aveni as one of America’s strategy professors most likely to influence the future of strategic thinking. And The Corporate Strategy Board in Washington, D.C. named him one of the seven most influential living strategic thinkers.

   He is the author of numerous articles in Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times of London,  The Wall Street Journal, and the MIT/Sloan Management Review, as well as the best selling book Hyper-competition, which is available in 11 languages. His last book, Strategic Supremacy, is available in 4 languages. His writings are credited with creating a new paradigm in the field of strategic management based on temporary advantages employing principles of rapid and aggressive maneuvering and innovation rather than on defensive barriers to entry and power over buyers and suppliers.

·        About Hypercompetition: "A modern-day analogue to The Art of War, the ancient Chinese classic that is the Bible of many corporate strategists. -- Fortune

·        About Strategic Supremacy:  “Timely, provocative and clear.”--Harvard Business Review

Proven Experience

   Professor D’Aveni is a consultant, CEO advisor, informal interim or surrogate CEO, and off-site strategic decision process facilitator for multi-billion dollar companies in the USA and Europe at the divisional and CEO-level.  His clients have included: Anheuser-Busch, Aetna, AGFA, American Tire Distributors, Bayer AG, BJ's Wholesale Club, Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney, Dun & Bradstreet, Fininvest Italia, GM, GE, Instinet (Reuters), Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Pepsico and Schering Plough.

   He has also been a keynote speaker at: The Conference Board’s CEO Forum, The World Economic Forum, Young President’s Organization, Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, CIO Forum, The Strategy Management Society, and the Management Center Europe, as well as numerous other professional societies and corporate events all over the world.

   Professor D’Aveni has worked with several billionaire families throughout the world and numerous Fortune 500 CEOs as their strategy advisor and private sounding board, offering advice on competitive and global strategy, organizational design, change management, top management team issues, board and investor relations, as well as helping them create their vision and management style and signals.

·        "Mr. D'Aveni and Mr. (Gary) Hamel reject formulaic management techniques in favour of a more fluid approach.  Once executives realise there are no set rules, they might be more willing to discard conventional ways of thinking.  It is a good time to be a maverick, they say, since old ideas have never been as useless as they are in today's business environment.” -- The Financial Times of London

·        “D’Aveni is the Kissinger of corporate strategy. His highly original and imaginative work imports ideas key ideas from the worlds of history and diplomacy to analyze and manage competitors and make decisions much more profitability.”-- Adrian Slywotzky, Author of the best sellers The Profit Zone and Value Migration  

Topics:

1) Hypercompetition: Managing in a Disruptive World

   The speed of change and the constant disruption of markets has caused a revolution in strategic thinking. Firms must rethink how they think about strategy. Old paradigms, such as sustainable advantage, SWOT analysis and Porter's Five Forces analysis, often lead to wrong conclusions. Using an interactive style, this talk deals with topics such as profiting from unsustainable advantages, building weaknesses rather than leveraging strengths, and reversing the way firm's treat stakeholders under the Porter model. Ways to thrive in dynamic, fiercely competitive environments are discussed as well as when Hypercompetitive methods are useful and when they fail.

2) Beating the Commodity Trap: How Smart Firms Win Price and Proliferation Wars
   Commoditization is the modern day equivalent of the black plague for the modern corporations. Everyone experiences it, most get trapped, and a few successfully beat the trap. But all commoditization is not equal. Commoditization is most commonly caused by one of three processes: deterioration, proliferation, and escalation of market dynamics. Each of these presents a different dilemma that traps the unwary into continuing or even exacerbating the problem. Identifying the dilemma imposed by each type of commoditization is the key to beating the trap. For each type of commoditization, the talk discusses how to escape, take advantage of, or destroy the trap. Tools for diagnosis and solution of the commodity trap are also discussed briefly, as provided by my recent HBR article on "Mapping your Competitive Position".