Strategy: It’s Like Riding a Bike, Not Climbing a Mountain

The competitive advantage that lets startups topple giants

Jeff Bezos says, it’s always day one at Amazon. What exactly does that mean? Bezos knows that, to stay alive, a company must always be evolving. Always experimenting, always moving on to the next thing — because customers are always changing, markets are always reshaping, and fresh competitors are always coming in.

To beat your competitors in modern industries, a company must meet its customer’s needs better than competitors do. Because we customers have access to information like never before, can be reached and targeted with incredible efficiency, and share our voices and opinions without hesitation. We dream of innovation, growing up watching how tech has changed our world a dozen times over. We want the latest and greatest, and we’ll be fickle for it.

So make customers happy better than all of your competitors, and you win. That’s how Google beat AOL, Facebook beat MySpace, Uber beat taxis, AirBnB beat hotels. Simple, right?

But here’s the trick: you can’t just make customers happy better than your competitors today — someone’s going to snatch that from you tomorrow. You have to make customers happy over and over and over again. Every day, for the rest of your company’s life.

That means you’ll have to change. You might need to improve your products or offer new ones. You’ll need to shift processes and reshape resources. You might need to acquire new talent or get rid of entire divisions. You might even have to compete with yourself.

So the real competitive advantage is change itself. How good is your company at changing itself?

This requires:

• Mechanisms to understand when a change is necessary
• Ways to understand what change is needed, and why it’s important
• Skills to measure impact of the change and adjust the change accordingly

Not best, but most relevant

We often think of achievements, especially in the corporate world, as climbing mountains and reaching peaks. But modern strategic advantage isn’t like that —there’s no final destination we can reach where we’re towering over the competition.

Today, to maintain competitive advantage, companies must learn to ride a bike. They must get in the habit of change, developing the muscles to constantly reshape their offers and processes to meet the needs of their current terrain. This is an entirely new paradigm: rather than figuring out best practices, we must continuously figure out today’s most relevant practices.

Happy cycling!