ABSTRACT
This book presents a way of thinking about business strategy and operational alignment. It also focuses on what causes firms to be sustainably successful. We will be concerned with three key concepts in our discussion of business success. The first two concepts, power and how rents are earned in markets, should at least be familiar. The concept of critical assets is, however, likely to be completely new to a great many readers. The aim of this chapter is to explore each of these concepts and to demonstrate how they can be drawn together into a coherent and robust theory of business success. This will involve the development of a rigorously defined and empirically testable concept of power in relationships between firms.
