Get The Sickness!

Inc. Magazine on Competitive Strategy

This blog is all about competitive strategy so I was interested in reading (belatedly) an article from the April 2008 issue of Inc. magazine about competitive strategy by columnist Joel Spolsky.

Joel makes an analogy about how a five minute speech made by an Army general taught him as much about business strategy as Michael Porter, the Harvard Business Review and a bunch of books by management consultants. The essence of the speech was "Fire and Motion" - you fire at the enemy and while they duck and avoid your shots, you move forward to another position.

I tend to agree with Joel that the competitive landscape is a fluid one. Today's advantage is tomorrow's me too proposition as many organizations are focused on knocking off innovators and trying to match their offerings. This is a fact of life and while it works for some (usually the largest competitors with huge ad budgets), a copy cat strategy is almost never a formula for success.

Buyer expectations have changed and I quote CSO Inisghts in a study that indicated that 83.7% of the firms they surveyed indicated that buyer expectations have increased over the past ten years partly due to the fact that prospective customers often review their options by comparing information posted on the Internet. For firms that don't have any points of difference or competitive advantages, it's easy to be overlooked.

I have been working with a company that has invested heavily in adding functionality and ease of use to SharePoint, Microsoft's web portal product. They have a number of enhancements and webparts that they have developed in the process of becoming a SharePoint expert. They had enough differences on their site(www.sharepoint360.com) , that they were called by NASA to help them with their SharePoint strategy.

Coming up with innovative new and different features is not only a good competitive strategy, its a great strategy for survival and prosperity.

posted by Michael Sick @ 12:10 PM