Last week we started speaking about how to think about what should be your competitive advantage and comparative advantage as you are building your career or business. Developing a sustainable and realistic competitive advantage in your career is challenging. Everyone reading this understands how difficult and tiresome it is to renew your profile so that you remain attractive to your organization and clients on a daily, weekly, and yearly cycle.

In this series, we are sharing with you our reply to one of our coaching clients. If you missed two earlier posts, please read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading today's post in this series. Otherwise, it will not make much sense since this is Part 3 of a 4-part series. So let's dive in.

Competitive advantage is how a company, or a person like you, arranges, sometimes mediocre, things/behavior/skills/assets/networks to produce an outstanding result. The competitive advantage is the system of organization and not any one attribute.

That is the key insight.

This is not new. This is the basis of Michael Porter’s work. It is just complex to explain and does not fit into bite-size narratives. That is why many experienced consultants and executives do not explain or understand strategy this way.

Yet, it is a profound insight. Think of Southwest Airlines. Sure, you can steal their people, copy their pricing, use their slogans or even try to copy their turnaround times.

How do you copy an entire system of organizing and running things? To do that, a Southwest competitor would end up being a completely different company and most companies are not willing to go through that kind of effort. It is too much work, costs too much and most people are unwilling to go through such a wrenching change.

Understanding this about competitive advantage is crucial to your career.

First, it makes it really difficult for people to copy your advantage if it is built into a system. To do so, they would first need to understand your system of organizing things and second, they would need to implement it. They are both terribly difficult to do.

Let’s go back to the Naomi Watts story. As an aspiring young actress, how do you figure out what Ms. Watts does to have the ability to undertake such complex roles? Do you stalk her or hide under her bed? Let’s assume you did figure out exactly what she did, could you replicate it?

Could you replicate all the messy and painful things you need to do on a daily basis to be that good?

Are you willing to go to bed every day at 9 pm sharp to build your immune system? Are you willing to forgo endless party invites at posh nightclubs since the noise forces you to speak louder and hurts your throat, and you need to be in bed by 9 pm? Are you willing to avoid alcohol for 11 months to prepare for a movie? Are you willing to lose 50 pounds and smoke 6 packets of cigarettes a day for 6 months to prepare for a movie?

The short answer is no. We like to assume competitive advantage is a single simple attribute like height, beauty, or financial modeling.

Sports provided many examples of this concept.

How many times have we seen an average sports team topple the expected winner? Certainly, sometimes it is due to luck, weather, or food poisoning. However, a good coach will know how to arrange average players to generate a result greater than the sum of the parts. That is a simple example of where the way the team is organized is a competitive advantage. No one player is the advantage.

How do you copy that? You cannot. You cannot even explain it easily. That competitive advantage has an enormous barrier to entry. The best you can do is hire away the coach to hope he can replicate the system in your own team.

There are numerous examples of this but the Miracle on Ice is close or the 1994 Rugby World Cup final. Individually weaker players were organized in a superior manner to beat teams with individually stronger players. It is not that the losing teams were organized in a weaker manner, it is that they made decisions to emphasize individual strengths.

In a famous study published in the Harvard Business Review about “stars” in banking, it was found that the so-called stars analysts did far less stellar when they moved banks. That is because the receiving bank assumed the star's innate skills were their competitive advantage when it was actually the integrated banking support system in their previous employer that allowed them to be successful.

The stars underperformed since the receiving bank did not have the same system, the new hire was unable to replicate the system in the receiving bank, or the new hire could not fit into the new bank’s system. This is a classic example where the hiring bank assumed the competitive advantage of the rival bank was something as simple as one or two analysts.

The competitive advantage of the releasing bank was the way it organized itself which allowed its people to perform well, and that is what you saw in the market: star analysts due to the bank’s organization. Cause and effect were mixed up. The bank was not successful due to these few analysts, but rather the few analysts were successful due to the bank.

I think Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer. Compelling prose, with interesting ideas. He certainly has good hair.

Though, like my earlier advice, I would advise you to take the lessons offered by him with some caution. This is not because Gladwell is trying to mislead anyone at all. The main reason is that to make his book accessible to everyone, he needed to simplify it, and the context of that simplification is important.

Even the loser practices 10,000 hours and possibly more. It is naïve to think that hard work and perseverance alone lead to triumph. This type of thinking makes you underestimate the competition. Do you really think no one was practicing as much, if not more, than Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods?

We do not hear about those who failed because they did not make it, but to assume they did not make it because they did not practice enough is misleading. Nike and Adidas cannot build multi-million dollar deals around Eric Menendez who practiced more than 10,000 hours but did not make it.

Never heard of Eric Menendez? You never heard of him because he did not make the pro's, not because he did not try hard.

So be careful of picking those narratives that make you feel good, but offer no prescriptive solutions to success.

I will stop here to not make this post too long and in the final upcoming post, I will share the 4 steps we asked this client to take.

I hope you are enjoying these thoughts. Comment and let us know what are the biggest challenges you are currently facing in your business or your career. 

Take care,

Kris

P.S. If you would like to receive sample episodes from our strategy, problem-solving, leadership, consulting practice building and communication training programs on StrategyTraining.com, you can get it here.

A version of this article was originally published on www.FIRMSconsulting.com.