Sublime

To bring about better organizations, we need to risk speaking the truth of our soul and learn to navigate the conflicts that might ensue.

These six assumptions, on which most companies hypnotically build their strategies, keep companies trapped competing in red oceans. Specifically, companies tend to do the following: Define their industry similarly and focus on being the best within it Look at their industries through the lens of generally accepted strategic groups (such as luxury

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

And so the model of the thalassocracy emerges as the most useful precedent to understand the current challenges related to the competitiveness of nations. In the Entrepreneurial Age, what matters is less the enclosed land than the wider sea; less asset ownership than the mastery of non-appropriable resources (the sea yesterday, the multitude today)

The creation of new strengths through subtle shifts in viewpoint. An insightful reframing of a competitive situation can create whole new patterns of advantage and weakness. The most powerful strategies arise from such game-changing insights.

Rarely do sellers think consciously about how their customers make trade-offs across alternative industries. A shift in price, a change in model, even a new ad campaign can elicit a tremendous response from rivals within an industry, but the same actions in an alternative industry usually go unnoticed.

The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.