How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition
Posted by admin | Under Business Strategy Monday Oct 20, 2008Many organizations encounter ferocious competition in the marketplace. Try as they might to set themselves apart, any static, snapshot differences are fleeting and temporary. Identify and meet some unfilled customer need in an untapped market in a novel fashion and challengers will soon flood in. Find a preferred supplier and others will quickly clamor to gain access. Employ a new scientific insight or technological approach and everyone else will quickly adopt it. The result of such market fluidity is often intense, cutthroat rivalry. Yet here and there, we see companies and organizations, in and out of the private sector, that manage to stay ahead of the pack for years or even decades at a time. Displaying combinations of speed, agility, responsiveness, and endurance, they see and seize opportunities and, by the time rivals have responded, the leaders have raced on to further opportunities, leaving competitors in their wake.
In Chasing the Rabbit, I discuss these pack-leading rabbits, high-velocity organizations, whom everyone else chases but never catches. In the book you will find plenty of examples of things going right and things going wrong, lessons being learned and lessons being ignored. The failures can be heartbreaking and infuriating, but I believe you will find the successes of these rabbits inspiring. They are within your reach, although not without effort. The successes of high-velocity, high-performance organizations do not depend on mustering a workforce all possessed of some extraordinary talent. With hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of employees, that would be quite impossible. What makes these organizations high-velocity is the way they deliberately and consistently make the best use of the ordinary distribution of human talent, while their competitors let so much of it be ground between the wheels of repetitive frustration, firefighting, and failure.
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