The goal of the editors is to stimulate thinking about the increasingly chaotic environment and to present fresh, boundary-spanning research. The twenty papers were gleaned from one hundred submissions from authors representing eleven countries. The result is a series of reports, some empirically based, others philosophical in nature, that capture the new status quo of competition. Taken together, they provide insights and understandings about how hypercompetition has come to pass and how organizations must transform themselves in order to survive.

Eighteen of the book’s twenty chapters focus on forces that drive hypercompetition. The last chapters of the book present two different ways to think about hypercompetition. One explores the dark side of new organizational forms and one relies on metaphor to lend understanding. For example, are hyperturbulence and hyper-competition best understood by thinking of an out of control automobile careening down a slope? Reading this book will leave you scratching your head, somewhat better off for having had the experience, but still wondering how the transition from the industrial age to the knowledge age will play out – or, at least, who will be left standing.

Hypercompetition is the market’s response to disorder. The rapid proliferation of information technology has produced an inflection point that marks the end of one cycle, that of competition as it was practiced during the 20th Century, and hypercompetition as it now emerges. Accompanying it is the emergence of a temporary and contingent workforce, global markets and small firms entering markets with greater speed, more knowledge and less financial capital than ever before. Organizations are experimenting with a range of new forms and strategies to accommodate these changes. The form of response depends on a firm’s competitive position at the time of the change, its historical capabilities and its preferred adaptive style.

Organizational adaptation requires managers to stretch their notion of design far enough to embrace a paradox: maximum flexibility within a configuration that locks down technology, structure, culture and control. The delicate balance between routinization and flexibility is a challenge not easily met in theory or in practice. Paradigms in traditional organization theory are based on stability seeking and uncertainty avoidance. Studied prescriptions for strategic management are ‘dead-on-arrival’ in a hypercompetitive environment. Even thinking about institutionalizing uncertainty and rapid change boggles the mind. Firms are responding to this challenge in radically different ways. Are ‘disposable’ organizations the wave of the future? Guidance is spotty, but available. For example, Thomas reports that internal reorganization is the most critical step in realizing dynamic benefits of hypercompetition. Itami reports that hypercompetition is a familiar concept for Japanese firms. All firms, he reminds the reader, have three weapons at their disposal: price, product and service. In a hypercompetitive environment, firms stay away from price wars because all firms lose. Instead, they compete in two other ways: by marketing many varieties of products so as to satisfy small niches and by competing on service. Firms succeed that have stability in their system so that they can be fiercely competitive and adapt quickly to change. Coupled with efficient, flexible product development systems, successful firms market a product and, if it is not successful, replace it quickly with something new. Forecasting the market five years ahead is an exercise in futility; instead, firms go to the market and experiment. This requires stability in human networks, a challenge that has not been fully balanced by the rush to contingent workforces.

Another dimension to hypercompetition is what Bailey’s chapter on the paralysis of deep pockets discusses. This is the tendency for successful companies to fail to recognize threats and to postpone taking action even when the threat clearly challenges their future. Shielded by a belief that they are in a hypocompetitive environment, the very beliefs that made the company strong make them see changes as just so much noise. An effective challenge, he warns, requires a change in the way management frames the market.

A chapter that describes Microsoft’s maneuverability asserts that there is no lead that is not surmountable. To stay abreast of the market, Neupert reports that the company adopted a ‘do-it-try-it-fix-it’ approach. This tactic is similar to Itami’s emphasis on Japanese experimentation with product and service responsiveness.

The Japanese ‘beer wars’ between Kirin, Asahi, Sapporo and Suntory provide another example of adaptation. In the 1980s, the Japanese beer industry, which had been a stable oligopoly, experienced a ten-fold increase in the industry’s new product introduction rate. Driving this were a combination of demographic, dietary, social and distribution trends. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Asahi had nothing to lose by risking a frontal attack on Kirin, the industry leader. The examples of how the firms reacted to hypercompetition define the features of the beer wars: substantive change in the firm’s sphere of competition; transformation in nontrivial ways; and significant performance effects that derive from difficult-to-imitate specialized capabilities.

Throughout these, and all the other chapters, it is clear that competitive advantage is transitory and opportunities are quickly closed. Rapidly escalating competition is marked by frequency, boldness, and aggressiveness that creates constant disequilibrium and change. Affected more by chaos theory than linearity, hypercompetition proceeds at a faster and faster pace in unpredictable ways. Nault’s and Vandenbosch’s chapter, entitled ‘Eating Your Own Lunch: Protection Through Preemption’, addresses the need for rapid product development. They make the point that firms with dominant market positions should cannibalize their own advantages in product, process, or knowledge with next generation advantages before competitors step in and steal the market. This requires investing in and launching next generation advantages while current advantages are still profitable. In other words, it means trading current profits for future market leadership. They use Hewlett Packard’s domination in both laser and inkjet printer markets and Intel’s mastery of the microprocessor business as successful examples.

You get the drift. This book is not for bedtime reading. It is jarring in its insistence that we are in the midst of an historical inflection point, where the cycle of the industrial revolution meets the newfound cycle of the information age. The turbulence that results as these two cycles abut one another has created a storm that quickly capsizes those who continue to manage the way they always have. Mired in notions of assembly-line production methods and hierarchical authority systems, firms are faced with an environment which demands that they transform themselves into flexible instruments that sense market shift and act immediately if they are to survive. This book is useful for those who practice, study, or theorize about management and organizations.