D'AVENI, Richard

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Cornell University, A.B., 1975; Suffolk University, J.D., 1979; Boston University, M.B.A., 1979; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1987

ADDRESSES:

Office—Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, 100 Tuck Hall, Hanover, NH 03755. E-mail—richard.a.daveni@dartmouth.edu.

CAREER:

Educator and author. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assistant professor of business, 1986-88; Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, professor of strategic management, 1988—; CEO and founder, RadStrat.com. Consultant to Fortune 500 corporations; regular speaker at executive education programs, including Wharton School of Business.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowships from the World Economic Forum, the Richard D. Irwin Foundation, and the Sol E. Snider Entrepreneurial Center at the Wharton School of Business; A. T. Kearney Award.

WRITINGS:

(With Richard E. Gunther) Hypercompetition: Managing the Dynamics of Strategic Maneuvering, Free Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Hypercompetitive Rivalries, Free Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Robert E. Gunther and Joni Cole) Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power through Spheres of Influence, Free Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to journals, including Organization Science, Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review. Member of editorial board, Academy of Management Journal, 1991-96, Organization Science, 1992-2002, Strategic Management Journal, 1994-95, and Administrative Science Quarterly, 1995-96.

SIDELIGHTS:

A professor of business strategy at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, Richard D'Aveni also works extensively with strategic planners at large corporations, advising them on how to make their companies revolutionary within their fields. Additionally, he advises others on how to create order out of the chaos brought about by these corporate revolutionaries.

In Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power through Spheres of Influence, D'Aveni and coauthors Robert E. Gunther and Joni Cole define strategic supremacy as "the ability to continually create, use, share, distribute, redistribute, preserve, stabilize, counter, circumvent and direct the pattern of power" within a particular business sector. They then caution that if companies do not gain strategic supremacy in their markets, others will. D'Aveni advises global giants that they will probably never become the elephant that learns to dance, thereby making it crucial that they build strategies around their massive resources. To leverage their weight, global firms will need to establish a sphere of influence, beat back the forces of competitive compression surrounding their spheres, and develop strategies for routing resources within their sphere to absorb, shape, hedge, or dampen the revolutionaries.

Reviewing D'Aveni and Gunther's Hypercompetition: Managing the Dynamics of Strategic Maneuvering, Cindy Tursman noted in a Business Credit appraisal that the authors are not blindly optimistic. In contrast, the strategies offered include "disrupting opponents so they experience constant psychological defeats, performance declines, and paralysis or bankruptcy, [and] it means 'that chivalry is dead' and cooperation is out." Tursman went on to observe that D'Aveni distrusts alliances between companies serving similar customers, noting that he believes "In an environment in which every advantage rapidly erodes, cooperative agreements are inherently unsustainable." A Publishers Weekly contributor maintained that the book has a limited scope: "Examples of companies that have followed these strategies, even unknowingly, are few, and the ones D'Aveni includes are unconvincing. If a reader is not in the upper ranks of a multibillion-dollar multinational company, it is difficult to translate his theory into reality. Presumably even tiny firms could follow this strategy, but they will be hard-pressed to learn how, given D'Aveni's abstract, academic approach." J. C. Thompson, writing in Choice, however, praised the book highly, concluding that Hypercompetition "deserves serious attention to its striking revelations about both problems and responses to the fast-paced changes in the business world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 2001, Mary Whaley, review of Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power through Spheres of Influence, p. 693.

Business Credit, April, 1995, Cindy Tursman, review of Hypercompetition: Managing the Dynamics of Strategic Maneuvering, p. 40.

Business Ethics Quarterly, April, 1996, Noreen Dorenburg, review of Hypercompetition, p. 233.

Choice, October, 1994, J. C. Thompson, review of Hypercompetition, p. 330.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1994, review of Hypercompetition, p. 263.

Library Journal, December, 2001, Susan C. Awe, review of Strategic Supremacy, p. 140.

New York Times, March 21, 1989.

Publishers Weekly, November 5, 2001, review of Strategic Supremacy, p. 55.

Site Selection, August, 1996, Jack Lyne, excerpted talk by D'Aveni.

ONLINE

Bookwatch.com,http://www.bookwatch.com/ (April 4, 2002), review of Hypercompetition: Managing the Dynamics of Strategic Maneuvering.

Tuck School of Business Web site,http://oracle-www.dartmouth.edu/ (February 21, 2004).*