Profit Pools: A Fresh Look
In the Harvard Business Review article, Profit Pools: A Fresh Look At Strategy (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998) the authors provide a series of examples of how companies faced with daunting competition, consolidating markets experiencing exceptional price competition and erosion, and a very myopic focus on profitability were able to find profit pools and grow. The companies included in the analysis completed by the authors include Budget, Gucci, Hertz-Penske, Ryder and U-Haul. The authors have anchored their analysis with examples that clearly illustrate how many of the world's leading companies are blind to greater opportunities for profitable growth by only focusing on a specific area of their value chains instead of its entire breadth of opportunities (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998). They have defined a profit pool as the total amount of profits that are earned in an industry across all points of its value chain.
Included is a particularly well-done analysis of the PC Industry value chain, showing the dominance of microprocessor development followed by software and services. As Dell would find out, the PC industry is more of an integrative function that inherently doesn't have the value-add potential of Intel for example (Gadiesh, Gilbert, 1998). The innate structure of an industry will often dictate the trajectory of growth or decline and composition of profit pools over time as well. The series of examples throughout this analysis make these points very clear with regard to profit pool analysis and their implications on the current and future stability and viability of industries and the companies who compete in them. The following section of this assessment of the research in Profit Pools: A Fresh Look At Strategy illustrates a series of valuable lessons learned for companies who are competing in the industries mentioned. The lessons learned are also directly applicable to firms in industries that resemble the structure of the auto, PC manufacturing and distribution, high-end luxury goods (Gucci) and the truck and moving rental businesses.