Hamish Chalmers

“A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

“Within most well-established companies is a core of uniqueness. It is identified by answering questions such as the following: • Which of our product or service varieties are the most distinctive? • Which of our product or service varieties are the most profitable? • Which of our customers are the most satisfied? • Which customers, channels, or purchase occasions are the most profitable? • Which of the activities in our value chain are the most different and effective? Around”
― Michael E. Porter, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy

“Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.”
― Michael E. Porter, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy

“The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. Companies can reap enormous advantages from operational effectiveness, as Japanese firms demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s with such practices as total quality management and continuous improvement. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another. Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways.”
― Michael E. Porter, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy