Every organization should reward the internal behavior the generates external competitive results, but many organizations create internal reward systems that are at add with winning external rewards. Sun Tzu's strategy teaches that every competitive arena (ground) has its own rules. The rules of making a profit in business are different from the rules from winning a baseball game and both are different from the rules that winning an election.

Our Master Trainer, Alan Elder, critiques this article in Harvard Business Review about strategy. It is well worth sharing with readers of this blog.

In our training programs, we show people how to develop a simple competitive map of their industry using a tool that we call the Strategy Analysis Matrix. This matrix condenses the five competitive dimensions of Sun Tzu's Warrior's Rules into a two-dimensional representation. The purpose of this tool is to identify the market openings that represent opportunity. One of the companies we use to illustrate the use of this map is Apple. Apple is particularly good at finding the open spaces in the market that others are missing.

Competitive survival begins with the recognition that you cannot control the competitive environment no matter how much of that environment you control. The illusion of control is the most deadly for the biggest companies who lack active competitors. As a book publisher, I have been trying to tell people in this retail book channel how their slow cycle times and costly outdated practices were deadly.

People often confuse responding appropriately to challenges, which is always good, with the idea of defending an existing position, which is often bad. When we focus on shoring up defenses--lots of examples during the course of political and sports contests--we often lose sight of the key elements of the situation. Often the situation is that we are in a position that we shouldn't have gotten into in the first place and the best response is getting out of it.