Avoid Making Strategic Mistakes to Produce Competitive Advantages
An important axiom of competitive strategy asserts that one of the most compelling methods of producing competitive advantages is to avoid mistakes made by your competitors.
Just avoiding mistakes produces a very serious competitive advantage.
The most important mistakes to avoid when working to double your productivity, value and income, however, are “strategic mistakes”.
Strategic mistakes in business are actions, or behaviors, that are counterproductive to the fulfillment of a plan of action or an intention, such as fulfilling your business mission, succeeding in the marketplace or living a good life.
They are actually a constellation of missing, incomplete, flawed and weak thoughts and actions about competitive learning, fulfilling ambitions, accumulating knowledge and power, and producing competitive advantages and superior value.
Given the speed with which the global marketplace is changing, it is more important than ever strategically to be able to notice, observe and assess strategic mistakes.
Fundamentally, strategic mistakes are a lack of respect. They are failures to appreciate the meanings, relevance, value or purposes of situations, forces, concerns or people. They are failures to hold them in high regard. They are often expressions of cultural conceit and hubris.
They are disrespectful because they ignore, disregard or dismiss fundamental relationships or operations.
Effective, strategic action, on the other hand, respects fundamentals.
It reflects respectful concerns and assessments of an offer’s, practice’s, narrative’s or strategy’s importance, utility and worth for coping with reality to avoid threats, fulfill obligations or exploit opportunities.
Strategic knowledge, behavior that respects reality, and the discipline to always be respectful are three requirements for producing competitive advantages.
Declining offers to accumulate strategic knowledge that enables the production of high annual incomes, enterprise values and capital-at-work to take care of your spouse and children, for instance, is disrespectful behavior and a strategic mistake.
Making this strategic mistake thwarts intentions to think and act effectively, strategically and competitively enough to fulfill the financial, career and business intentions necessary to live a good life throughout one’s entire life, including 25+ years of unemployment during old age.
To Start, Respect the Realities of Life
Reality, fundamental forces, knowledge, competitors and ambition must be respected or they will squash you like a bug and thwart any effort you make to earn enough money to take care of your most fundamental and important concerns, e.g. housing, food, transportation and health care.
None of us has any choice about respecting the realities of our lives. We either respect them, or we suffer and fail.
Disrespect towards reality is a complacent, smug and blasé way of thinking and acting that can lead to no other outcome than failure.
The common disrespect of most businesspeople produces profound negative consequences to their and their spouse’s ability to live a good life, or even to survive, during old age.
Aji helps businesspeople become better observers of conceit, hubris, disrespect, strategy and strategic mistakes, and the consequences to their concerns, situations and capabilities, especially to their capacity for competitive learning and for producing and executing strategies to fulfill their ambitions.
This article is based on the writings of Toby Hecht, author of Aji, an IR#4 Business Philosophy. 4.7 stars on Amazon.
Explore aji.com. Learn how businesspeople use Aji to notice, observe, assess and avoid strategic mistakes.
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