Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The new competitive challenge from Chinese businesses is like nothing seen by Western companies since the Japanese arrived twenty years ago with their cars and consumer electronics. To fend off these fierce competitors, managers must forget yesterday's image of Chinese companies as producers of cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets. In fact, by strategically implementing what the authors call cost innovation, Chinese firms are advancing into high-end products and industries and competing for such high-value activities as engineering, design, and even R&D. The first book to examine this new competitive force, Dragons at Your Door exposes the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of these fast-rising Chinese competitors, surfaces the underlying logic that enables Chinese firms to attack high-end industries, and provides critical new insight into these very different competitors.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface and Acknowledgments (p. vii)
• Introduction: Dragons at Your Door (p. 1)
• 1 Disrupting Global Competition: How Did They Get Here So Fast? (p. 27)
• 2 Cost Innovation: The Chinese Dragons' Secret Weapon (p. 57)
• 3 Loose Bricks: Rethinking Your Vulnerabilities (p. 89)
• 4 The Weak Link: Limitations of the Chinese Dragons (p. 123)
• 5 Your Response: Winning in the New Global Game (p. 149)
• Conclusion: Charting the Future (p. 193)
• Notes (p. 205)
• Index (p. 211)
• About the Authors (p. 237)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

According to business professors Zeng (of Cheung Kong Graduate School in China) and Williamson (of INSEAD in Fontainebleau and Singapore), the slogan of the China International Marine Container Group, "Learn, Improve, Disrupt," could just as easily apply to any such Chinese corporation, each of whom are busy using those principles to reinvent manufacturing, with global consequences. The authors reveal that low labor costs are only one advantage enjoyed by Chinese companies, and that the "three faces" of cost innovation (offering high technology at low cost, a near-impossible range of choice, and "speciality products" at volume prices) have given them impressive inroads to markets long assumed impenetrable. This is sobering reading for Western audiences; while the authors avoid the alarms that sound throughout many current business books on China, their dry, factual approach may prove even more unnerving. Though it may paint a disturbing portrait of a competitor formidable even in its infancy, the anecdotes and analysis this volume brings to light are bound to inspire anyone serious about global business or politics today. (June 12) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ming Zeng is Professor of Strategy at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, China. He is currently on leave from the School and serves as president of Yahoo China. Peter J. Williamson is Professor of International Management and Asian Business at INSEAD, the international business school in France and Singapore, and the author of Winning in Asia.