Not a race to make decisions. The best decisions to be competitive. Every CEO is trying to maximise business performance, which means competitiveness, through a stream of strategic and tactical decisions made yearly, quarterly and daily. Here is a test: ask your executive team to define what makes the company competitive. The answers will vary. That variance is the crux of the problem. A team that does not agree on what competitiveness is cannot make consistent decisions to build it.
A working definition
Competitiveness is the set of internal advantages a company holds, relative to its competitors, in selling, promoting and delivering the products it offers to the markets it serves. The advantages can be people or process, but customers have to see them as valuable, unique, high quality and worth the money. In strategy shorthand, they are competitive advantages, and they live in the value chain: the processes in which people sell, promote and deliver. Decisions aimed at strengthening those links, measured in growth and profitability, are what drive competitiveness.
Three steps
Know your key products and markets. Obvious, and widely skipped. Many companies carry products that are unprofitable, consume disproportionate money, time and people, and return nothing financial or relational. Say no to those and the decisions on people and process can be aimed where advantage is built.
Assess the value chain honestly. With the products and customers clear, walk every activity with performance data: cost to perform it, cycle time, quality as the customer and the competitor would judge it, timeliness as the customer values it. Activities that add no value and meet no regulatory or customer requirement get stopped or changed. The result is a clear picture of the type, location and size of each strength and weakness.
Then look from outside. Take the same assessment and ask how a competitor and a customer would read it. The gap between the internal view and the external one is where the next decision lives.
Where it sits on the page
This is tool four of the MOVE® system, advantage and future capabilities, done properly: advantage defined against the competition and tested through the customer's eyes, then the capabilities to protect it funded in the project portfolio. Fourteen years on, the only change is speed. The value-chain assessment that took a quarter can be done in days with AI doing the data work. The judgement about which advantage to build is still the executive team's.
Monday
Ask five executives, separately, to write the company's competitive advantage in one sentence. If you receive five sentences, that is the strategy work. If you receive one, ask the three largest customers whether they agree.
