Competitive Advantage

For decades I have been pursuing a sustainable competitive advantage around issues such as value, excellence, and customer service. I no longer believe that these issues are sustainable. For example, in an accounting firm, gone are the days where the competitive advantage is around being a full-service firm or client service levels. If I was running a CA or CPA firm I would have "we will win by being the best place to work" as our competitive advantage. This advantage recognizes how important it is to attract and retain the best people. It will focus on issues such as life-long learning, fast-tracking careers, and even, having fun at work. Building a community around the firm is the key.
If I was a manufacturing firm I would have, "we will win by being the best business to work with", in this case I am thinking of the customers, the suppliers, and the employees. The issues this time are around, ease of working with, exceeding expectations, understanding the specific needs, and anticipating needs. For employees that translates into flexibility of work, use of technology, and leadership.
For an organization such as Mindshop, the emerging competitive advantage is likely to be, "we will win by best creating a sense of family at work". The issues driven by the sustainable competitive advantage statement include, communication, rate of contact, trust, and mutual support. It is the values such as trust and support that are the key to building and maintaining a family culture. The challenge is how to create this culture. I suggest that selecting clients with similar values will continue to be essential. Building trust with our clients so that they will share honestly with us their fears and concerns is the step before being able to effectively support the clients.It also creates a need to deepen our skills in a wide range of hard issues (strategy, diagnostics, training, problem solving) and soft issues (confidence, motivation, behavior modification).
The "big picture" issues that I see for Mindshop in 2011/12 include, achieving step-change, and increased collaboration. The step-change will require doing different things, new structures, basically doing a pareto analysis on ourselves and throwing out the 80% of the "trivial many" to enable focus on the 20% "vital few". If the step-change is structural, then the collaboration is cultural. We need both. The collaboration starts with how we coach and support our clients, how we run our meetings and conferences, and includes increased collaboration between clients.
I predict that in 2011/12 we will build a stronger Mindshop family. As the diffusion of innovation model specifies, initially around 16% of our clients will "get it", followed by the next 34%, and ultimately another 34%. This path will not be easy, but that's life, anything of value is usually hard.