Don’t be like everyone else

This week, I had a wonderful conversation with the CEO of a midsized company (around 1,000 employees) to discuss business strategy and the implications on technology strategy in the overall context of digitalization. As the company supports its customers with digital solutions, it’s an example of the part of the economy that’s doing really well under the current circumstances. It’s a good reminder of the fact that it’s not so much that the economy is cratering, but rather that there are quite fundamental and accelerated shifts towards digitalization taking place in it. It’s just that news outlets prefer to talk about bad news (companies going out of business) instead of good news (the business of some companies is booming) because bad news sells more ads (if it bleeds, it leads).

The discussion with this CEO focused on the positioning of the company. It has much smaller competitors, as well as those that are (much) bigger and the question becomes how to differentiate your organization from these competitors. The simple answer is to do what they do but better or cheaper. However, as Einstein so eloquently said, for every problem, there’s an answer that’s simple, elegant and wrong.

The slightly less simplistic answer is to focus on one of the corners of the competitive triangle (customer intimacy, technology leadership or operational excellence) and organize your company based on that. Again, this perspective isn’t necessarily wrong, but it fails to give guidance as the question then becomes when to use what strategy.