The Escher Cycle: Creating Self-Reinforcing Business Advantage

The strategic advantage Jackson offers businesses is built on four layers of business activities: performing better than rivals; balancing and aligning activities; fine-tuning activities to match the relevant economy; and connecting activities so that they are all optimized. The final stage is the Escher Cycle, which Jackson contends will create a self-reinforcing business advantage. He illustrates his lessons with real-world examples, many diagrams and quotations from everyone from Karl Marx to Monty Python. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Finn Jackson is an original thinker, writer, and consultant with a unique focus on strategic innovation. A self-styled 'business architect', he helps create new businesses and rejuvenate existing ones. His expertise in strategy, process, and organization has helped create sustainable strategic change in numerous organizations, ranging from start-ups to billion-dollar business units in more than a dozen countries worldwide. Born in India, Mr. Jackson earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford University¿where he developed his desire to discover the underlying causes that drive observed behavior¿and his MBA summa cum laude from Imperial College, London. At EDS he worked his way up through the business, ultimately serving on the European Leadership Teams of two of the company's top three global accounts. Over nine years, he created lasting strategic change in almost every functional area of the business and became intimately involved in what drives success at all levels of business. He lives in England, and works internationally.