Choosing Your Strategic Role (Part 1)

Strategic roles are guiding stars that tell you when to fight, how to fight and when to avoid a fight. Competitors either defend, attack, flank or pursue niches. What these roles share in common is that they all rely on concentrating resources at the right point of attack. While the defensive role is by far the strongest, the niche role is the one that most of us should be playing.

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Choosing Your Strategic Role (Part 2)

Strategic roles are guiding stars that tell you when to fight, how to fight and when to avoid a fight. Competitors either defend, attack, flank or pursue niches. What these roles share in common is that they all rely on concentrating resources at the right point of attack. While the defensive role is by far the strongest, the niche role is the one that most of us should be playing.

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Deciding Where to Play

One of the most critical strategic imperatives is the decision about where to play. This decision requires you to clarify “which jobs you will perform for your customers” and “which jobs you won’t”. This decision demands tradeoffs, requires the courage to ignore the herd and becomes even more important as the level of competition intensifies. Effective where to play decisions must answer three fundamental questions: 1) what jobs can you be best in the world at, 2) what jobs can you do profitably, and 3) what jobs are you passionate about doing?

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Defining How to Win

Defining how to win describes the activities that you will do differently than rivals to distinguish the jobs that you have chosen to perform for your customers. One of the most common strategy traps is to failure to perform a different set of activities than your rivals do. The alignment of activities is also critical because individual activities often affect one another. When activities are consistent and reinforcing, the competitive advantage accumulates rather than eroding or offsetting. Companies like Southwest Airlines and Ikea outperform rivals because the cumulative effect of their activity systems are hard to replicate.

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Quantifying the Impact of Strategic Choices

Customer flows help you identify the leverage points where your effort will have the greatest impact. While early market entrants tend to focus on opportunities that are upstream in the customer flow (market opportunities), late entrants tend to focus on downstream opportunities (brand opportunities). While customer flow calculators can help quantify the leverage points with the greatest impact, prioritization of strategic options should always consider both the size of the opportunity and the probability of success.

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