"break away from the assumption of sustainable, competitive advantage and embrace adaptable differentiation"

""Be ready to face and learn from increasing change. The trick is not to lose sight of one's acquired abilities and values but to find ways to continuously learn how to communicate and display one's own beliefs in different ways. Know that when you want to play in the big league, you are going to be very exposed, through social media and all that, and to be okay with that.
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"You need to be quick about what you do and don't agree with, and to support that with your words and actions. Yet, keep a very open mind because you may discover soon, in the face of new knowledge, that you were wrong."
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Dr Van Coller-Peter quotes Forrester Research's chief analyst Craig le Clair: "Companies must break away from the assumption of sustainable, competitive advantage and embrace adaptable differentiation, i.e. develop an agility advantage. Forrester defines this agility advantage or business agility as the quality to embrace market, operational, technological, cultural, leadership, political or any other changes as a matter of routine."
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For the individual it would mean moving from an established expertise to constantly acquiring cross-functional skills."

Trecho retirado de "​Move from a competitive advantage to an agility advantage"

"top source of sustainable competitive advantage"

"As soon as a smart product or business idea becomes popular, the urge to copy it and commoditize it is the strongest force economics can unleash. Jeff Bezos summed this up when he said “Your margin is my opportunity.”
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The key to business and investing success isn’t finding an advantage. It’s having a sustainable advantage. Something that others either can’t or aren’t willing to copy once your idea is exposed and patents expire.
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Finding something others can’t do is nearly impossible.
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That leaves doing something others aren’t willing to do as the top source of sustainable competitive advantage.
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Here are five big ones.
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The ability to learn faster than your competition...
The ability to empathize with customers more than your competition...
The ability to communicate more effectively than your competition...
The willingness to fail more than your competition...
The willingness to wait longer than your competition"[Moi ici: E volto à Purdue e à paciência estratégica]

Trechos retirados de "Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage"

E volto ao contexto e ao nuclear

Volto ao capítulo IV do livro "The End of Competitive Advantage", leio:

"Run Nonnegotiable Legacy Assets for EfficiencyJust as you need to reconfigure existing structures to go after new opportunities, so too you need to deal with the assets tied up with those existing structures. In many cases, they are still important to your organization, but they are no longer growth opportunities. The watchword here is to extract as many resources as you can from running these activities, because they no longer represent opportunity.
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The eroding differentiation of legacy assets can sneak up on you if you aren’t strategically alert. In past work, I’ve commented on the fact that what was once exciting and sexy about a product, service, or other offering that companies provide eventually becomes a commoditized nonnegotiable attribute. That means that customers expect something similar from all providers. The dilemma is that these things are often highly expensive table stakes. Not offering them to customers enrages them, but offering them, even offering them exceptionally well, does nothing for you competitively.
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Because you have to do them but they don’t add to margin or gain you market share, the mantra for delivering them has to be to focus on cost savings. The slide from exciting to nonnegotiable means you need to change how you run the assets that deliver expensive nonnegotiable attributes.
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There are a number of ways in which nondifferentiating activities can be made more economical. One is to centralize them under a shared-services model to end duplication of things being done in many places. Another is to create absolutely standardized processes rather than continue to support dozens of idiosyncratically designed ways of working. Remember, the activity or thing in question is not delivering a competitive advantage, so it really can’t justify being highly customized—it’s common in the industry. Simplification—such as eliminating handovers, automating portions, or making some of a process user generated—is a further source of cost savings. And of course outsourcing makes sense as well, particularly if the activity is not part of your competitive secret sauce."

 E não consigo deixar de recordar as minhas reflexões sobre os processos de contexto e processos críticos:

• "Dealing with Darwin"
• "Como descobri que não é suficiente optimizar os processos-chave." (parte I, parte II e parte III)
• "Processos contexto e Processos nucleares"

Arenas em vez de indústrias

Comecei a leitura de "The End of Competitive Advantage" de Rita McGrath de onde retirei estes trechos logo no início:

"One of the biggest changes we need to make in our assumptions is that within-industry competition is the most significant competitive threats. Companies define their most important competitors as other companies within the same industry, meaning those firms offering products that are a close substitute for one another.
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It isn't that industries have stopped being relevant; it's just that using industry as a level of analysis is often not fine-grained enough to determine what is really going on at the level at which decisions need to be made. A new level of analysis that reflects the connection between market segments, offer, and geographic locations at a granular level is needed. I call this an arena. Arenas are characterized by particular connections between customers and solutions, not by the conventional description of offerings that are near substitutes for one another.
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The driver of categorization will in all likelihood be the outcomes that particular customers seek ("jobs to be done") and the alternative ways those outcomes might be met. (Moi ici: A unidade de análise são os clientes-alvo, não a indústria onde se opera) This is vital, because the most substantial threats to a given advantage are likely to arise from a peripheral or nonobvious location.
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This further raises the issue that a firm may not have a single approach that holds for all the arenas in which it participates. Instead the approach may be adapted to the particular arena and competitors it is facing.
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The arena concept also suggests that conventional ideas about what creates a long-lived advantages will change. Product features, new technologies, and the "better mousetrap" sorts of sources of advantage are proving to be less durable than we once thought. Instead, companies are learning to leverage more ephemeral things such as deep customer relationships and the ability to design irreplaceable experiences across multiple arenas.(Moi ici: Cá está, o poder das relações, não a tecnologia!!! Recordar "O futuro também passa por aqui")
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The imagery of arena-based strategy is more that of orchestration than of plotting a compelling victory, and implementation on the ground by those actually confronting conditions within a specific arena becomes increasingly important." (Moi ici: "Orquestrar um enredo")