Egg Face Now Appearing In Many C-Suites

How do you define competitive advantage? Your C-Suite? Your board of directors? As a so-called expert on competitive advantage, here’s mine:

Competitive advantage is the ability to – repeatedly – win the volume/revenues/margin you seek and sustain them because you have a sustainable strategy that fuels buyer/user delight in a way competitors can't or won't. Even if this definition seems reasonable, it comes with this catch:

Due to emerging marketplace dynamics, which are integrating and impacting each other at ever-faster ways, drivers and enablers of competitive advantage have dramatically evolved. My recent multi-year study on competitive advantage identifies and explains this phenomenon. Most concerning, the study also found that most executives and board directors are unaware of the rapid change and its impact. I will roll out study findings over the next months. For now, note these risks:

Business leaders are not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to anticipate the future and act on it early and fast enough to keep their organizations viable, growing profitably, and delivering long-term value creation for shareholders.

• Their leadership, Governance, and money will be misplaced.

• They’ll invest in optimizing a business and revenue model that’s already outdated, when they could instead invest in game-changing efficiencies, including innovations that grow and strengthen their market, growth, and margin.

• They’ll not get the dramatic benefits they could from AI and agentic AI.

• They’ll be unprepared to maintain or update any advantage they currently have.

• They risk being left “in the dust” of other companies whose leaders understand the new drivers and enablers of competitive advantage.

To address these concerns and avoid having egg on their faces, these leaders must:

• Immediately align everyone behind the same right definition of competitive advantage and the new drivers and enablers of it.

• Align understanding of the new drivers of competitive advantage, how they came to be, implications for a company or brand’s situation, and the competitive set.

• Assess your current advantage. Identify opportunities for maintaining it. Explore possibilities for future growth and advantage.

• Cast a three-to-five-year strategic plan for future advantage, using the success metrics of advantage. I will release my first public report on the changing nature of competitive advantage at thenetworkone Indie Summit, an international marketing conference in London Sept. 30. The report focuses on how to address competitive advantage through a new approach to strategic planning. Two weeks later, I will discuss the findings' impact on Governance at the annual conference of NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) in Washington, D.C. Can’t be in the audience for either event? Then keep in touch by visiting my LinkedIn page or the Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem hompage. Or risk having egg on your face, too.