Step 4: 4. Advancing Positions

1. Positions and Opportunities > 1. Understanding Positions > 4. Advancing Positions

Which of the following best describes what you need to understand about advancing positions?

1. I need to understand how people's motivations determine what "advancing a position" actually means.
   1.6 Mission Values

   1.6 Mission Values

   "It starts with your philosophy."
   Command your people in a way that gives them a higher shared purpose."
   Sun Tzu's The Art of War 1:1:14-15
   

   Situation: 

   We all have plenty of desires, but they change constantly and are often conflicting. Out of these conflicting desires comes our motivations, or what we call "mission" in Sun Tzu's strategy. An extremely common source of strategic mistakes is our failure to identify and clarify motivations. There are a whole list of problems associated with the lack of a clear mission. Without a clear mission, we drift with the situation at the mercy of our environment. We can react to events against our values and goals. Without understanding values and motivations, we will fail again and again in predicting people's behavior. Decisions and actions have no meaning outside of the context of goals and values that provide motivation. If we don't understand motivations, we will get into trouble time and again without understanding why.
   

2. I need to understand the ingredients that go into advancing a position.
   1.8 Progress Cycle

   1.8 Progress Cycle

   "End and yet return to start."
   Sun Tzu's The Art of War 5:2:7 (literal translation of Chinese characters).
   

   Situation: 

   Competitive processes are not linear. Production processes are linear. They convert raw materials step by step into a finished product. At the end of a production process, the product is finished. A linear process runs in one direction. The problem is that we are only trained in linear thinking so we expect competitive processes to be linear, but they are not. They are cyclic. They continually loop back upon themselves, reincorporating feedback from the environment into our next choice of actions. Their processes are never finished. They have no true end point. Whether successful or not, each advance requires another advance. The process is always a loop. Every advance brings us back to the beginning where we start working on our next advance.

3. I need to understand how competitive advances are different from advances in production .
   1.9 Competition and Production

   1.9 Competition and Production

   "Supporting the military makes the nation powerful.
   Not supporting the military makes the nation weak."
   Sun Tzu's The Art of War 3:4:3-4

   Situation: 

   In the last several decades, the term "strategy" has been increasingly associated with planning and management control. The problem is that this confuses internal production with external competition. Production and competition are complementary opposite skill sets. Sun Tzu described the productive half of this dynamic as the "nation" and the competitive half as the "army." He warns that there is a tremendous danger in not clearly separating these two very different and yet complementary methodologies. In recent decades our focus of production has greatly overshadowed our understanding of competition. And, as the principles of complementary opposites requires, this imbalance creates a shift in the environment. Two centuries of advances in production have led to both the atrophy of competitive skills and the worldwide spread of production knowledge. At this point, we have diminishing returns from improving production, so the key advantages are shifting back to the competition side of the equation.