Creating Competitive Advantage, Aligning Strategies, and Driving Them Through Operations

November 9, 2010

Creating competitive advantage while developing and executing aligned business growth strategies and company development strategies is a very difficult set of concepts for most people to grasp all at once.

I find that each person has a “comfort zone” where they are really good, but they also have difficulties with one or more of the following:

  • 1. Conceptualizing a complete set of the possible competitive advantages, the possible business growth strategies, and the possible company development strategies.
  • 2. Understanding how to align business growth strategies with company development strategies and doing them in a way that maximizes their creation of competitive advantage.
  • 3. Determining their best set of competitive advantages, business growth strategies, and company development strategies at any given point.
  • 4. Understanding how to drive their chosen set of strategies into their day-to-day operating activities (product development, marketing, sales, people, etc.)
  • 5. Understanding how to adjust their strategies as the results from their day-to-day operating activities surface.

This is the first of a series of posts intended to address the concepts of creating competitive advantage while developing and executing business growth strategies and company development strategies.

My first few posts are broad, for I need to frame out the various concepts and link them to each other. These posts include:

I will work to define each of the concepts, provide examples, and demonstrate how they link to each other and to operational execution. I will also update this post periodically as I develop the series.

If you are oriented more toward day-to-day operating activities, the first few posts will seem too conceptual and the latter posts will feel more in your wheel-house. If you are more conceptual/strategy oriented, you will be more comfortable with the earlier posts and less interested in the more specific operational posts that will come later.

Look for my next post on “What is Competitive Advantage?”

Founder & Partner

As the founder of OpenView, Scott focuses on distinctive business models and products that uniquely address a meaningful market pain point. This includes a broad interest in application and infrastructure companies, and businesses that are addressing the next generation of technology, including SaaS, cloud computing, mobile platforms, storage, networking, IT tools, and development tools.