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Creating Competitive Advantage

June 24, 2010 By

“The essence of maneuver is taking action to generate and exploit some kind of advantage over the enemy as a means of accomplishing our objectives as effectively as possible. That advantage may be psychological, technological or temporal as well as spatial. ”

-MCDP 1

3 Laws For Creating Competitive Advantage For Your Business

Science has given us several fundamental laws which describe how our world, and the entire universe for that matter, will always operate. Take Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion or the three fundamental laws of Thermodynamics as an example. From these seemingly simple laws, much of our entire complex world can be described. Modern scientists and physicists are still searching for the ultimate universal law, a theory of everything, which will capture the very nature of the universe mathematically. Until they succeed, this article will now present the three laws of creating competitive advantages for your company. I urge you to use their power wisely.

Before you read anything else, I want you to ask yourself two questions. What is the one thing that my company does better than anyone else in my marketplace? Can you state it within the context of your Business Center of Gravity (BCG)? If not, I urge you to go back and answer that question after you finish this article and have put some thought into it. Until you can answer that question, your company will continue to struggle.

Now, was your first answer related to differentiating your product or service? Odds are that it was. The two basic forms of strategy suggest that a company will pursue a strategy of either cost leadership by achieving the lowest price or one of differentiation where specific attributes of a business set it apart from all others. The following laws correlate creating competitive advantages through differentiation as we encourage the pursuit of a differentiation strategy over a cost leadership one.

The first law of competitive advantage is the principal of conservation of differentiation. This law states that competitive advantages based on differentiation are neither created nor destroyed, they can only change form. This is critical to understand because in an ultra-competitive marketplace, a competitive advantage will not remain an advantage indefinitely. Remember, your competition as the ability to adapt. The consistent transformation to new competitive advantages is what will generate long term cash flow and prevents the erosion of your strategic positioning.

The second law of competitive advantage is the principle of the constant factor rule in differentiation. This rule allows you to separate constant factors of your company outside of your business model and concentrate on differentiating the company itself. In other words, there are certain things that are required to be done by any business and certain industries require certain things to be preformed. Such constants must be examined separately from the truly differentiating factors of the company. For example, just because a wedding photographer delivers photographs to her clients, this alone does not giver her an advantage in the wedding photography industry.

The third law of competitive advantage is the principle of Business Center of Gravity (BCG). This law says that a competitive advantage is proportional to the significance of the BCG times the impulse of the business in the market. A Business Center of Gravity is what your company cannot function without and is directly linked to what your customers and clients cannot function without. The significance of your BCG times the force your business exerts in your marketplace over time directly results in the influence of your competitive advantage on your ideal clients. This means that you must understand and know your Business Center of Gravity as well and create massive and rapid forceful actions within your market if you are to truly leverage the power of your strategic positioning.

With these laws in mind, it is important to understand that competitive advantages are generated by the communication of the Business Center of Gravity and that creating new advantages is critical to business success because your differentiation will erode over time. A good fourth law would be to forget the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. It has useful applications for keeping people busy, but within the context of the laws of creating competitive advantage it is unsupported and will not help you in creating true and powerful differentiation. Just like the greatest scientific laws that describe movement and energy, the these laws will provide you with a clear and actionable understanding of the nature of your business so that you can generate revenue by truly leveraging your differentiation.

In order for your business to grow and succeed, the most critical thing that you must focus on is Creating Competitive Advantage positioning for your business and communicating your advantage to your target market. A business strategy of differentiation depends on your Competitive Advantages and Paradigm Shift Enterprises, LLC excels at helping you Discover, Accelerate, and Leverage your hidden competitive advantages. Call us today to learn how US Marine Corps warfighting principals will allow you to dominate your competition immediately.
Filed Under: Ambush Advantage System, Competitive Advantages, Differentiation, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

What is Your Competitive Advantage?

June 24, 2010 By

“The successful execution of Marine Corps Tactics hinges on the thoughtful application of a number of tactical concepts so as to achieve success on the battlefield. Key among these concepts are achieving a decision, gaining advantage, being faster, adapting, cooperating, and exploiting success.”

–MCDP 1-3 Tactics

If you are not currently creating and exploiting new competitive advantages -  then you are already failing.

The #1 question you should be asking right now in your business is this: “What is my Competitive Advantage in my particular Situation and how can I exploit it for my gain immediately?”

In any combat or business situation, there is always one side that will exploit a competitive advantage better than the other. As I began working on my M.B.A. and really studying business, I began noticing more and more references and analogies that compared business to combat and war. It seems that business leaders, just like military officers are huge fans of the writings of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. I found this interesting and started wondering how many modern business leaders actually have any combat or military experience. A March 8, 2010 article in Fortune Magazine stated that, “According to a forthcoming study called “Military CEOs” by a pair of economists at Harvard and MIT, in 1980 59% of chief executives of large, publicly traded U.S. companies had military experience. By 2006 the figure was 8%.” Today, with more combat veterans entering the private industry workforce, I predict a massive rise in this statistic in the coming years and for success to be associated with those businesses led by former military leaders.

I consider my fellow professional warriors of the world to be experts in creating and exploiting advantages for success on the battlefield. Regardless of whether that battlefield is overseas or in local, national or global markets, military professionals know what it takes to lead, make decisions and to win the fight. What is it that separates those with military experience from those without? After four long years at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, more than seven years as an Officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and two combat deployments to Iraq, I feel qualified to answer this question.

Certainly leadership skills are arguably higher than in their civilian peers, but I will suggest that when it comes to implementing business strategy that there is an even more important factor than just leadership. It is this attribute that allows so many former military personnel to excel in whatever they choose to pursue after taking off the uniform.

That critical factor is the ability to rapidly make decisions, adapt and leverage a competitive advantage with little more than the commander’s strategic intent. There is a significant difference between strategy and tactics, but when it comes to executing tactics on the frontlines, I have received no better advice on the matter than a short statement from MCDP 1-3 Tactics on the matter. It says, “The successful execution of Marine Corps Tactics hinges on the thoughtful application of a number of tactical concepts so as to achieve success on the battlefield. Key among these concepts are achieving a decision, gaining advantage, being faster, adapting, cooperating, and exploiting success.” Just for a moment, consider the implications on your business if you could do these things with the precise execution of the Marine Corps.

Therefore, we should develop a strategy around our competitive advantage that will be leveraged when the tactics we use to implement that strategy are in line with the concepts described by this Marine Corps doctrine. So, it follows that our business operations should begin with rapid, advantage centric decision making, and conclude with the exploitation of success. The knowledge of the core competitive advantage of your business thus becomes paramount. Without a clear answer to the question; what is your competitive advantage? Your business will stagnate and struggle.

This is such a critical concept because it is your competitive advantage that must provide the context for all your decision making processes within any given situation. Operating under any other context will not provide you with an outcome of success, let alone position you to exploit success. At its core, this is the fundamental paradigm shift that occurs with military professionals entering business. They fully understand how to assess a situation, rapidly orient their position and quickly decide on a course of action that will exploit a competitive advantage to generate successful accomplishment of the strategic objectives.

Do you have a competitive advantage that is so clear, that you can quickly and easily communicate it to your frontline employees? Can your frontline workers or salespeople then achieve a decision that will exploit success with in the context of your competitive advantage? If not, they you are not operating from the same paradigm that your combat veteran competition is. And I will be the first to tell you that when you go head to head in competition with them, they will win and you will loose…every time.

However, there is a solution. You can compete and you can not only win, but you can eliminate your competition when you shift your paradigm to the Marine Corps warfighting model. Never forget that business, like war – is a serious fight to survive. When you incorporate these tactical concepts into your overall strategic position strategy, you will be able to truly leverage your competitive advantage and exploit it in the battle to generate cash flow. When your business operates from this context you will make decisions faster, adapt quicker, and achieve success immediately.

In order for your business to grow and succeed, the most critical thing that you must focus on is Creating Competitive Advantage positioning for your business and communicating your advantage to your target market. A business strategy of differentiation depends on your Competitive Advantages and Paradigm Shift Enterprises, LLC excels at helping you Discover, Accelerate, and Leverage your hidden competitive advantages. Visit today to learn how US Marine Corps warfighting principals will allow you to dominate your competition immediately.

Reference: http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/04/news/companies/military_business_leaders.fortune/index.htm?section=money_latest&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_latest+%28Latest+News%29
Filed Under: Competitive Advantages, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Differentiation – Competitive Advantage Marketing

June 24, 2010 By 2 Comments

Leveraging your Competitive Advantage is the Only way to stand out from the crowd in today’s overcrowded markets. Your customers/clients don’t know you and they don’t care. Make them stop and take notice Now!

Translating your competitive advantage from your strategic plan through your marketing communications is absolutely critical to achieve accelerated business growth.

Here is how you get started:

3 Ways to Execute Competitive Advantage Strategic Planning

There has been a lot of research published lately by the Harvard Business Review that deals with the breakdown between strategy and execution.  One of the findings has been that of all strategic initiatives implemented by businesses, only 30 percent of them are actually successfully executed.  Additionally, of those that are executed, the CEO’s of those companies view the process as too slow.  The most common approach to transition a new strategic initiative into execution mode is to adapt new technology or by creating new processes.  If this is the current paradigm of execution it is clear that the latest research shows it to be ineffective. Therefore, we must create a paradigm shift that will enable the execution of strategic planning to achieve the desired end state.

To create this paradigm shift to success we must examine three U.S. Marine Corps principles; Commanders Intent, Mission Statement, and Concept of Operations.  These three principles translate into; a clear strategy, unity of effort, and adaptability.  By thinking like a Commanding Officer and applying these principles in conjunction with the fundamentals of leadership, your strategy will be effectively and efficiently executed while your business is rapidly overtaking your competition.

The commanders intent is the broad outline for achieving your desired endstate. It should be relatively short and easily communicated and understood. It is descriptive of your strategic initiative, and although it defines and endstate, it does not specifically detail each and every specific action required for execution.  The critical aspect is that is created clarity and a deep understanding of the ultimate goal.  It is the catalyst that sparks organizational buy-in and commitment to its success.

The next component is a clear and actionable mission statement.  A primary goal of the mission statement is to create unity of effort in support of the commander’s intent.  No matter how badly as you want it to, the mission statement does not describe the how of the strategy.  It simply states the 5 W’s; who, what, where, when and why.  The why is the most important.  In order to effectively execute a strategy, the why must be clearly explained in no uncertain terms.

Lastly, we finally arrive at the how of the strategy.  The concept of operations is used to explain how the commanders intent and the mission will be achieved.  This is often the hardest part of creating a plan, but not because you have to consider every detailed step of the process.  It is hard because in the concept of operations you must task your subordinates to consider the details of execution while still leaving them enough room to adapt quickly and maneuver appropriate to ever changing situations.  Yes, it is essential for execution that you do not refine every minute detail of the operation.  Instead, you must create a scheme of maneuver that will support the mission statement and commander’s intent and allow for flexibility and lower level decision making throughout the execution phase.

The effectiveness of this process is that no plan, no matter how detailed, will be executed perfectly.  This is because it is impossible to account in the planning process for the complexity of an uncertain and dynamic environment.  Instead, it is critical to create the clear understanding of the intent and the mission that will allow those executing to have the flexibility they will need.  When those executing the strategy take ownership of the intent of the strategy and fully get behind it, it will ultimately succeed because they will take the actions required to succeed.

Those actions are not generated by force, but by the clarity and adaptability of the strategy combined with the unity of effort of your team.  When you want to implement a strategic plan, and control the direction that your business is going, this is the best way to do it.  If it works for the Marine Corps in the uncertainly of combat it will most certainly work for you.

Marine Corps strategy and tactics is the secret weapon that will accelerate your business success.  Business like war – is a serious fight to survive.  If you want to overtake your competition and dominate your marketplace you must know how to execute your strategy based on your Competitive Advantage.  To do this, you will need to experience a paradigm shift to discover the path from Strategic Planning to increased revenue and accelerated business growth.  Paradigm Shift Enterprises, LLC will teach you the military thinking that will transform your business into an unstoppable force immediately. Contact us today for a strategic consult. 

Filed Under: Center of Business Gravity, Competitive Advantages, Differentiation, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,