Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

I’m delighted that my book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and What Great Companies Can Do to Catch Up and Win, has received welcome accolades in the last few days.  The book was awarded a Shingo Prize for Research Excellence, media attention (see links below), and it received a flattering appraisal in Harvard Business Review’s April issue.

The reviewer, Anand J. Raman, writes:

He concludes…

Chasing the Rabbit is based on my research which was initially meant to answer the question: Why was Toyota doing so well despite:

(a) being in a hyper competitive market,
(b) starting well behind its rivals, and
(c) having been studied and imitated intensely?

The answer was that for all the attention that outsiders had paid to particular production control tools, the company’s real genius was its management system that fostered and sustained high velocity, high endurance improvement, innovation, and invention across a broad range of work. I later found other organizations that had arrived at similar approaches, and with the generous help of myriad practitioners showed that this ‘high velocity’ approach has great impact across a broad range of situations.

Based on this research, Chasing the Rabbit explains how competitive advantage can be generated in even the most arduous markets and illustrates its points with diverse examples from heavy and high tech manufacturing, new product development and production, commercial and military situations, and health care.

I’m much indebted to those who helped advance this work over many years and it is my hope that their efforts and mine prove to be useful to you and your colleagues as you attempt to generate far more value with far less effort than most in your fields even imagine possible.

With best wishes,

Steve Spear