800-CEO-READ Blog

Unfair Advantage – Is Organic

"So much changes that your plan is obsolete by the time it is printed." That was a common refrain I heard from CEOs and their core teams while doing the research for The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect. Yet the serial entrepreneurs I met were clearly following a plan to quickly move from an idea to a world-class IPO within five years. So what was going on?

I finally got it! What the veterans meant was that their initial unfair advantage had to be able to change over time. It had to react to counter-moves by competitors. It had to drop some elements and add others as the new enterprise grew from child to adult. Those changes made unfair advantage a living thing. It is organic.

As soon as you launch your new product, the competition reacts. Then you have to react to their reaction. When CEOs and their core teams that can do that, year after year, they can build a wildly successful new enterprise. They have a competitive advantage based on their ability to react dynamically with swift, powerful strategic responses. They are able to anticipate as well as deal with good and bad surprises, much better than their arch rivals. You can read examples of this in Chapter 9 of The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create it, Build it and Use it to Maximum Effect.

So what in your core management team is evidence that they are people with the ability to dynamically respond to tough reactions by tough competitors, and then emerge from the battle as the winner, the gorilla that dominates the new hill? Icons of Silicon Valley like Don Valentine founder of Sequioa Capital look for such managers in the companies his firm invests in because they produce the Ciscos of the world.

Try writing how you plan to react to your competition’s reaction after your next product launch. Do it in less than a page and tell me what you discovered as you wrote it. For instance, did it reveal a weakness in your competitive position? How will that affect your story to investors and potential employees?