How To Be Different

The race to future success is an extremely intense and fierce race that all businesses, regardless of size, must compete in. In that race, there are companies that, despite their small and limited capital and scale, "have the guts" to compete with the giants in their heyday. Clearly, these challengers are motivated by something far greater than short-term financial objectives. Their investments, alliances, international expansion strategies, and new product announcements all reflect the same assumptions about the future. They frequently refer to highly ambitious goals – goals that extend far beyond the time constraints of the typical strategic "plan." Challengers have repeatedly succeeded in inventing entirely new forms of competitive advantage and largely rewriting the rules of engagement. The advantage of flexibility is prioritized over the advantage of speed, which is prioritized over the advantage of supplier management, which is prioritized over the advantage of quality. Senior executives in these companies appear to view competition as a race to build capacity rather than a race for immediate market share. These executives appear to spend less time worrying about how to position their company in the current "competitive space" and more time developing a fundamentally new competitive space. The remaining businesses, the followers, are more concerned with preserving the past than with creating the future.