We Need To Shift Our Mindsets To Compete In An Ecosystem-Driven World
In 1980 Harvard professor Michael Porter published Competitive Strategy, which recommended that firms create advantage by driving efficiencies throughout the value chain and mastering competitive forces by maximizing bargaining power. These concepts drove corporate thinking for decades.
Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porter’s ideas were ascending among CEOs in the establishment industries on the east coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem.
Competitive advantage can no longer be reduced to the sum of efficiencies in a value chain, but is embedded in webs of connections. To compete in an ecosystem-driven world, Leaders need to do more than adapt how we deploy assets, we need to look at things differently. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, we need to inspire and empower belief.
Shifting From “Compel And Control” To “Access And Empower”
In the 1920s Henry Ford built the almost completely vertically integrated River Rouge plant. Because the company had the ability to produce just about every facet of its product…
