Making Strategy: Mapping Out Strategic Success by Fran Ackermann & Colin Eden

Author:Fran Ackermann & Colin Eden
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781446250013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2011-08-23T14:00:00+00:00

Discovering distinctiveness is very difficult. Rarely are individual competences distinctive.

Our own work with organisations on the practicalities of understanding and exploiting competitive advantage started over 20 years ago. Over this time we have worked with, and studied the nature of, competitive advantage and distinctive competences in over 100 organisations. Perhaps the most significant learning from these experiences has been that discovering distinctiveness is very difficult. Rarely are individual competences distinctive – most often it is patterns, bundles or portfolios of relatively distinctive competences that can be distinctive and provide competitive advantage. In addition, it is most often the case that distinctive competences are such that they would never be noticed by a customer, and often not understood by a competitor. This means that competences based on culture – ‘world-taken-for-granted’ ways we do thing around here – will be significant aspects of distinctiveness that can be exploited.

As noted above, applying the concepts of distinctive competences and core competences in organisational settings is difficult in practice. Identifying ‘core competence has too often become a “feel good” exercise that no one fails’6 and ‘true core competences are hard to define precisely and are often discovered retrospectively. That is, as you experiment, you define your competences by simply describing your successes and failures’.7 Other experts also have had difficulty: ‘We talked to [core competence experts] and asked them to help us identify our core competences. But after having them work with our senior management, leading them through some group exercises, we really had a mess on our hands. We could not define what was core as opposed to non-core, and what was a competence as opposed to some process or offering we just did well’.8

Consequently, this forum, when done well, can be one of the most rewarding for a management team. The pay-off can be very significant as most organisations have never attempted to get to the bottom of where competitive distinctiveness lies or even consider what competences they have. They will usually have worked with lists of things that are not competences, things that are not capable of being strategically managed, and with no recognition of the need to understand the systemicity of competences9 – that is interconnected networks of individual competences – in order to reveal current and potential distinctiveness. In this chapter we suggest that (1) the most likely form of resource distinctiveness arises through the identification of a unique pattern of competences, and (2) that core competences arise by analysing the network of relationships between competences and the distinctive business goals or purpose of the organisation. Thus core competences are central to (or at the core of) the network of relationships between competences and organisational purpose (see chapter 5).

The forum is also likely to introduce new ideas about how to seek out new business that exploits distinctiveness.

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