The Effect of Passion and Discipline — Competitive Advantage

To reiterate, strategy is the theory of organization effectiveness. In practice, it requires passion and discipline, because if we want to achieve extraordinary results, we cannot act in an ordinary way. This is the mantra of strategic management — from classical books by P. Drucker, through works of K. Ohmae, K. Andrews, M. Porter, G. Hamel, A. J. Slywotzky to the Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Ch. Kim and R. Mauborgne.1 Ordinary action produces ordinary results. In strategic categories, thinking and acting means that the company is looking for a way to act differently than others, but it is a particular way. We are interested here in repetitive actions, which set the company apart from the competition (distinction) and simultaneously ensure extraordinary results — or in other words, a competitive advantage. In this sense, every competitive advantage is a temporary and local quasi-monopoly, that is, a niche or a position, which, when used appropriately, ensures company advantages. Both words used in the above description of advantage, ‘temporary’ and ‘local’, are very important.