The Competitive Strategy Reality Check: Do You Actually Know How You Win?

Do you understand competitive strategy? Do you have one? Is it optimized—can it drive your growth trajectory?

If you’re making money, there’s a competitive strategy at play. The real question is how well is it articulated so others can embrace it and align their efforts and if you know what it is, is it optimized and truly driving where you want to go.

Beyond Having One—Employing It for Growth

It’s not just “do you have one.” This is really about employing your competitive strategy to drive the growth trajectory that you’re wanting. When you’re a business, you want to employ our competitive strategy to get enough business in the door to build enough of a pipeline. Then you want to grow more volume and preserve the margin. Then you get to a stage where you go, “Okay, do we want to scale this? What options do we have to scale?”

The Scaling Ambition

If you have ambition to grow, this is when you really come into play in terms of unleashing the full firepower of the business. The way you’re going to be able to do that is by moving to true agile and unlocking every human being’s willingness—arms, legs, head, heart, and hands.

The Human Firepower Element

When everyone is motivated and excited about the work they’re doing day to day, when they are thinking every day about what’s happening—you’ve got their brain, their heart, and their hands all locked in. That’s when competitive strategy becomes a multiplier, not just a positioning statement.

The Trade-Off Function

Another element that’s important is the “saying no” side of using competitive strategy. You’ve got to use your competitive strategy to be able to do the trade-off discussions. To be able to say, “Yeah, that looks like a shiny new object over there, but it doesn’t really align with everything else that we’re doing, and it will diffuse our focus.” Or it is a “not now because these activities need to happen first to optimize our performance.”

The Capability Question

To really unleash competitive advantage, you need to move beyond the “super-doer” stage. Every team begins with a super-doer, then they get some other super-doers. But you end up with someone controlling the system for all the right reasons—however, that will fundamentally block growth. You cannot truly scale with this model in play.

It works to an extent, and it’s probably important as a stepping stone. But the more that you can start to reach out and involve others, and then deliberately look at what capabilities would need to be institutionalized to fulfill that job—that’s when competitive strategy becomes scalable.

The Bottom Line

Your competitive strategy isn’t just about external positioning—it’s about internal alignment and capability building. When everyone understands how you compete and feels energized about making it happen, you don’t just execute strategy—you unleash the full firepower of your organization.

Can your team clearly explain how you compete differently, and are they energized about making it happen?