The End of Competitive Advantage
Rita Gunther McGrath is a globally recognized expert on strategy and Innovation. She is a world-renowned speaker, faculty member of “Colombia Business School, Executive Education” and a consultant for major corporations. Recently she came up with this amazing strategy which allows us to re-think about our point of view of organizational strategies. Simply what she says, being stable in a fast moving highly competitive market is the most dangerous thing and on the other hand, it means organizations have to be more sensitive to change management and pay more attention to it. (Kinni, 2014)
As she explains, your competitor may come from a different industry. It always doesn't have to make the same or similar product as you are, but it may have same goals as you. So, to remain in the industry, in the competition “ compete in Arenas, not Industries”. Avoid the trap of being stuck in the sustainable competitive advantage. Move out, take risks, do experiments, learn from failure and work on new opportunities. Nowadays people are putting money into being connected, we should take chance and invent something to secure our territory rather than fail because this kind of platforms has more opportunity than we think and most importantly we have to think about what customers are looking for. With the globalization customers are knowledgeable than ever and have demands on specific things. AS Peter Drucker, an American businessman says “The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him”
New ways of running organizations, which is a challenging task to traditional companies since most of the time companies do not react to changes in their environment. Waiting until the last moment to take necessary actions against the environment fact changes is very dangerous, it can be too late. Healthy disengagement makes a huge difference because it can save your brand from losing its value and reputation and also allows the organization to still remain in the industry. Being stable is not normal anymore, challenging the risk is what normal and is the way of remaining in the market. Continuously being in motion, reconfiguration, constantly pushing new horizons; new business models, navigating goals are the key items in a successful business organization’s schedule. Most of the time when a company always seek a new opportunity they are in motion which is an advantage for being in the industry because it's easy for them to adopt the next change.
Again, Rita McGrath wonderfully explaining the advantages of separating the power in the organization from the resources control. We have to move resources within the organization for the development of more new inventions. This may sound simple at first, but when its come to real world big organization it's not that easy. It takes a lot of time for decision making, plans and procedures. But yet, once done, it will be the reason behind the success and backstage hero.
While we talk about the end of competitive advantage Rita McGrath does not speak how this will connect to achieve internal goals of companies such as employee satisfaction. When companies run in a competitive environment the ignorance of employees satisfaction is high. They always push their employees to work hard instead of encouraging them. Building a more employee friendly environment is important as remaining in the business. As Richard Branson says, Employee comes first and the customer second. If your employee happy, he will make the customer happy. Taking this as note considering ethics and values will help any organization to achieve its longtime goals. Running in the competition searching for an eternal success often leads any organizations to bad results one day. Today because of the globalization, urbanization and modernization organizations and people use to work like robots. But McGrath doesn’t really touch this topic in her method. Even though she talks about asset utilization and flexibility the target is just to reach the peak of the success and remain in the success which does not clearly explain about internal goals. (McGrath, 2013)
Afterall, when we consider these new techniques in order to achieve organizational goals we should analyse the whole picture and try to adjust taking the middle path without failing by losing everything or hit the peak of the success in just numbers.
References
Kinni, T. (February 17, 2014) Strategy+Business; Rita Gunther McGrath on the end of competitive advantage Retrieved from:
McGrath, R. (2013) End of competitive advantage: How to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business. The United States of America, Harvard Business School
The End of Competitive Advantage by Shashi Kariyawasam on Friday, 6th April 2018.
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