THE LANCHESTER STRATEGY FOR MANAGEMENT

あらすじ

Introductuon Lanchester’s laws were originally presented as laws of combat, but in Japan they have been adapted into ”laws of competition.” If one applies Lanchester’s laws to business strategy, previously vague aspects of running a business become clearer, so it becomes easy to apply them to actual business situations. When these laws are applied to business, the following things become clarified. First is the relationship between market share and profitability. Second, distinctions can be made between the ”strategy of the strong” that can be implemented by the company fulfilling the conditions necessary to become top-ranked, and the ”strategy of the weak” that must be implemented by those, including the second-ranked company, that have failed to meet those conditions. Third, specific weightings can be assigned to products, their marketing strategies and tactics, and other such important factors and attendant procedures comprising a business. I believe that these ideas, which until now seem to have escaped the attention of guru consultants in the United Kingdom and the United States, constitute a novel approach. Author Profile Yoichi Takeda was born in October, 1938, in Kurume, Japan. After completing high school, he graduated from the economics school at Fukuoka University. After working in the back office for a building materials manufacturer, at the age of 27 he switched to working for a market research company, where he did credit checks on small businesses and post mortem analyses of companies that went bankrupt. Takeda first encountered Lanchester’s laws when, at 35 years old, he attended a seminar on the subject. Since then, his interest in Lanchester never abated. At the age of 44, he began business consulting based on Lanchester’s laws, lecturing all over Japan. He has visited Lanchester’s grave half a dozen times, translated some of his works, and in October, 2013, at the beginning of the one-hundredth year since Lanchester’s laws became public, he conducted eleven seminars in different parts of Japan to commemorate the occasion. He has published a number of books in Japanese.