战略竞争几何学.pdf

The Geometry of Competition By Bruce Chew A former business school professor reflects on the meaning and existence of competitive advantage. His finding: Competitive advantage is very rare, competitive position is very real. Identifying, building, and talking about advantage have been at the heart of my work both as a consultant and a business school professor for almost 20 years. Yet too much of the time I’ve found my own and others analyses of advantage to be like the famous Supreme Court writing on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And truth to tell I don’t see it very often. Consider a meeting I had recently overseas with a group of managers who made an industrial product. For the first part of the day I’d talked at length about the sources of competitive advantage. During the afternoon I lead a break out session on strategy where the question on the table was: What is your competitive advantage? It quickly became clear that they were not the low cost producer. Well then we must be differentiated. Well, maybe, but how? One manager responded, “we have a good reputation.” To which the group replied, that is not really a competitive advantage. Another suggested, “Our products have features none of our competitors have.” “Yeah, but they will soon,” said another. We have good customer relationships. Yes, but that is not a competitive advantage either. Finally in a very senior manager jumped up and shouted “We don’t have any freaking advantage—got it? Has everybody got that? No advantage. None!” He did it with a fair amount of volume and profanity displaying his frustration borne not from his colleagues but from his sheer inability to make his business fit within the frameworks I had so eagerly taught earlier in the day. And that lesson has stood the test of time. Most competitors do not have a competitive advantage. That does not mean they don’t do things well. They may have good products, good customer rel