Picasso changed the way we look at art.Profit Patterns will change the way we look at business.Picasso's work reflected the social and technological changes that swept through the early twentieth century. Equally pronounced changes are sweeping through today's business landscape, often at breathtaking speed.        Profit Patterns provides a powerful discipline to see order beneath the surface chaos. Pattern thinking helps entrepreneurs, managers, investors, and key talent anticipate the likely direction of changes even before they happen. It reveals the economic meaning of these changes and provides the tools to capitalize on them.        Based on groundbreaking research into over two hundred companies in forty industries, from major industrial firms to upstart competitors, Profit Patterns contains a set of ideas and action steps that can be taken by you and your team. Here's a sampling of what you'll find:Practical  STRATEGIC  ideas:         Strategic Anticipation--the ability to "get it," to spot an emerging opportunity and chart a path there before the competition does.        Polarization--the winner-takes-all game, and why it's spreading to more and more industries.        Mindshare--the importance of seizing and holding on to the attention of key customers, investors, and talent.Thirty Patterns:        A repertoire of moves and countermoves to help you understand and exploit the forces changing your industry. This knowledge base of patterns will allow you to harness the strategic learning of the past two decades, eliminating the need to create strategies from scratch.In-Depth Examples: How Cisco Systems, Honeywell, Capital One, SAP, Staples, Nokia, Dell Computer, Bookswagon.com, and Bang & Olufsen detected patterns in their industries and put them to work and, in many cases, developed an almost insurmountable lead over their competitors.A Workbook:An aid to launching your own process of responding to change.In today's turbulent and discontinuous business world, it's no longer useful to analyze your industry in static, conventional ways. Profit Patterns provides the means to act before the ground shifts beneath you once again. It is the mental operating system for winning when the rules of the game change with such great frequency. Bookswagon.com Review Profit Patterns opens with a series of chaotic paintings by Pablo Picasso. Each piece is increasingly difficult to recognize; the final portrait is little more than a jumble of shapes and colors. But what does Picasso have to do with profitability? By recognizing industry patterns--by seeing the order beneath the surface chaos--managers, investors, and entrepreneurs can prepare for change before it even occurs. And while the Picasso-as-business-strategy metaphor may be a stretch, Slywotzky's theories are fundamentally sound, designed to spot and capitalize upon market trends in an ever-turbulent business world. Adrian Slywotzky--whose bestselling The Profit Zone explained how profits happen--this time focuses on making sure profits happen. He begins by defining the types of changes common to modern businesses, explaining why polarization is spreading among industries, and emphasizing the importance of mindshare. He then lists the 30 most common patterns that businesses fall into, such as microsegmentation, where "growing customer heterogeneity and increasing customer sophistication change the fundamental nature of the market." But even if a business is adept at seeing patterns, it's helpless if it can't mobilize its troops in time to capitalize upon pending change. Case studies of successful companies such as Cisco Systems, Nokia, and Dell Computer show how a company can detect industry trends, organize its workforce, and build giant leads over its competition. No wonder Picasso was a good businessman. --Rob McDonald Review "Know  the  Forces  Changing  Your  Business...and  How  to  Profit  FROM