From core competitiveness to adaptation Ligali Hammer and C.K

Core competencies: From core competitiveness to resilience

Gari Hammel and C.K. Prahalad that the core competitiveness is a difficult to imitate, irreplaceable, unique and valuable ability, is an enterprise of an "intrinsic content." The "Foundation" of enterprise competitive advantage lies in the core competitiveness. The core competitiveness is a fashionable topic after the competition strategy, but its vague definition and broad extension make it become a basket of everything.

In many cases, before a business succeeds, a firm cannot know in advance whether its core competencies match the cause or even what its core competencies are. The so-called core competitiveness, mostly in the business practice of continuous exploration, trial and error, in business practice emerged and constantly accumulate thickening. Most of the theory of core competence falls into the "cycle argument": first identify the enterprises with competitive advantage, then find out the so-called core competitiveness. Most of the core competencies summarized in best practice are hindsight, and there is not much guidance in management practice.

Under the network economy, to promote the sustainable development of the company, the first is the high adaptability, not the core competitiveness. Market competition is now on a global scale and the market is changing rapidly. The turnover of industry leaders is fast, and the so-called competitive advantage disappears faster than ever, and "one recruit" can gain a short advantage and be confronted with a crisis of subversion at any time. In addition, ignoring the new market environment and demand, enterprises are faced with the risk of complacency. Too much emphasis on core competitiveness, not only to the core rigidity, but also because of the path depends on the "hold-up."

In the book "Origin of Species", Darwin said: "The last to survive is neither the strongest species, nor the smartest species, but the fastest response to change." "The environment is an alternative mechanism that can determine which organism is more suitable for survival." In the network economy, because the outside environment changes extremely quickly, the survival is the enterprise faces the top priority. In a sense, survival and development are the same thing. Zhang that "there is no successful enterprise, only the enterprise of the Times." "All businesses can't think of themselves as successful because the company's so-called success is simply because you are on the beat of the Times." But who, which enterprise also can not always tread the rhythm of the times, because we are human, not God.

Either adapt or be eliminated. Adaptability requires enterprise organizations to be flexible and scalable as the market changes. Organizational adaptability includes strategic adaptability and structural adaptability. Dynamic environment, the company's business strategy in a timely manner, or to make the company's organizational structure has enough flexibility to adapt to the rapid changes in the market, has become any company must follow the most basic operating principles. The company should be regarded as an organism, it can feel the environment, adapt to the environment, and even change the environment. Enterprise's strategy and structure change, because of the tendency, is the enterprise's adaptability.

Strategic formulation: From optimal decision to satisfactory decision

In the era of industrial economy, the boundary conditions and initial conditions of strategic planning can be controlled, the competition situation and industrial pattern can be foreseen, and the causality between variables is also more definite. At that time, strategic management pursued the "optimal decision"-how to achieve maximum output and maximum return with the lowest cost, shortest time, maximum efficiency and optimal process under established conditions.

In the era of network economy, the change of environment rapid, the whole business world is showing more confused but more general complexity and uncertainty. When this complexity and uncertainty become the norm, it poses a great challenge to strategic decision-making: having to make choices and make commitments without fully understanding and controlling future returns or risks.

Under the network economy, "satisfied decision" is more grounded than "optimal decision", that is, not to pursue the absolute optimal decision, but to pursue a simple and efficient solution or even not inferior solution. Satisfactory decision is a strategic planning method based on rapid iterative approach. This is not only because of the limited human reason and energy, but also because the optimal solution usually requires enough information, and the acquisition of information takes time and cost, sometimes the speed of the solution can not catch up with the speed of change. The strategic life cycle is shortening, and careful planning of development is likely to become a pile of waste paper in a twinkling of an eye. Moreover, the optimal solution is also to pursue the best for some goals, while ignoring some other goals, such as robustness (i.e. the system robustness), stability, adaptability to the mutation environment.

The only certainty in today's world is uncertainty. The strategic management process is no longer a predictable, controllable and programmatic process, and strategic development is more a result of spontaneous emergence and coevolution than of artificial, leading design and planning. Sometimes it's more realistic to decide what not to do or even to reverse the decision.

Operating mode: From value chain to value network

In the 1980 's, Michael's competitive strategy has opened up a new field of business strategy and integrated strategic formulation and strategic implementation with competitive advantage as the center. Porter believes that the value creation of an enterprise is constituted by a series of activities, all of which constitute a value chain. In Porter's view, the value chain difference between an enterprise and its competitor represents a potential source of competitive advantage. In order to maintain competitive advantage, enterprises should establish advantages in certain strategic links of value chain. The competition between enterprises and enterprises is not only the competition of a certain link, but the competition of the whole value chain, and the overall competitiveness of the whole value chain determines the competitiveness of enterprises.

Value chain is an important tool to examine the relationship among all activities and activities within an enterprise in the era of mass manufacturing and mass customization, and to analyze the competitive advantage of enterprises. As mentioned above, under the network economy, the enterprise's various transaction costs are greatly reduced, the strength of the customer is unprecedented, the division of the public, personalized instead of popular.

The efficiency and advantages of the integrated model based on the value chain are not as good as before and replaced by more efficient value networks. From value chain to value network, it embodies the change from transaction cost minimization to transaction value maximization.

Integration is a typical operation mode of value network mechanism. Integration of customer value-oriented, tightly grasp the needs of customers reverse matching resources, the participants of the resources and ability to quickly link up, in a cooperative and mutually beneficial rules to achieve value creation and delivery. Consolidation does not ask for all but for use.

Innovative ways: From Independence to group creation

Since the industrial Revolution, social production has undergone three stages: the first stage is the large-scale manufacturing phase that began in the 1910 's. Thanks to standardized operating procedures and assembly lines, the Ford T-car was mass-produced. The choice is controlled by the manufacturer, "the car has only one color, and that is black." "The second phase was a mass customization phase that began in the 1980 's. The advent of Dell's online product customization allows users to configure different computers according to their own needs, although this assembly is still implemented by Dell in its factory workshop. In the mass customization process, users begin to have more choices and more satisfaction. Interaction is also beginning to occur between the enterprise and the user. The third stage is called the personalized customization stage. Consumers more personalized, the mass market was shattered, the combination of differentiation, presenting many varieties, less volume, fragmentation, consumers even DIY. Consumers through the process of customization, so that their personality is clear, but also to the feelings of a kind of talk.

Throughout the three stages of the transformation of production mode, the interaction between producers and consumers is changing quietly, consumers begin to participate in the process of product value creation, and there is "unity of production and elimination".

In the network economy, in addition to consumers, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders are increasingly involved in the enterprise's value creation activities, that is, crowdsourcing or group creation. Crowdsourcing to an open platform to aggregate users, suppliers, partners and the wisdom of the staff to play the internal and external groups to create the strength of the ideas and wisdom from different minds collide with each other, learn from, supplement and inspire, from disorder to order, from scattered to concentrated, from small to grand, burst out of the industrial economic era unimaginable power. Starbucks launches online platform mystarbuckidea.com to tap consumer creativity. Procter and Gamble uses the link development (Connect and development) strategy, seeks the intelligence storehouse through the network platform. Procter and Gamble even requires that 50% of the innovative ideas of each business unit must be obtained from the outside.

The value creation form of "group creation" relies on the more original pursuit of human's better world, which is their interest and hobby. It is the productivity of these non-material human factors that drives more and more people to participate in the process of group creation.

Power of the capital: from exclusive capital to relational capital

Broadly speaking, capital can be used as the general name of all kinds of social and economic resources that human beings create material, spiritual and credit wealth, including tangible capital, intangible capital, financial capital and human capital which are involved in the process of reproduction. In the traditional era of industrial economy, value creation relies on capital, land, plant, equipment, technology and knowledge, besides the most basic factors of production. These capital often have proprietary properties, owned or controlled by the enterprise. An enterprise is either entitled to ownership or, although it does not have ownership, the resource is controlled by the enterprise.

In the network economy, although the power of exclusive capital still plays a role, but the continuous expansion of the value network based on collaboration and social network make it possible to create wealth in a wider range, and become a new way of value creation increasingly. It is becoming a new winning force to use the interpersonal relationship among users and the relationship between stakeholders to build a strong relationship capital.

In addition, personalized customization gradually replaced large-scale manufacturing, crowdsourcing, production and elimination of integration, group creation, so that consumers are no longer passive recipients, users, suppliers, partners and so on more and more participate in the enterprise's value creation activities. Baidu, Google, Wikipedia is the user's participation in production activities witness. As macro-Wikinews says, "The world is your research and development department." Everyone for me, I for everyone, total production, create, share, become a new way of value creation.

Regardless of politics and ideology, from the economic point of view, the mode of value creation in the network economy is moving from capitalism to socialism and communism, and externality economy or network externality is the intrinsic economic power of network economy. Relationship is becoming a new capital force.

The nature of competition: from competition to cooperative competition

Under the traditional idea of "shopping malls, such as Battlefield", the competition aims at exclusive resources and exclusive surplus as a means to defeat opponents. The success of the competition is based on the failure of the opponents. Mainstream economics believes that the market is for competition, only competition can exert market effectiveness, competition efficiency is higher than cooperation. Friedman that in a globalized world, all friends and foes become "competitors".

In the era of network economy, no organization is isolated, but in the complex network interacting with other organizations, in addition to suppliers and customers, the participants of value network have complementary and competitor. These stakeholders in the way of group creation, for a common goal-to create value for customers, the nature of competition from the Life-and-Death competition to cooperative competition, emphasizing the interdependence between the players of the game, mutual benefit relations, competition in cooperation, cooperation in competition.

Cooperative competition is a kind of positive and game that can achieve multiple wins. Cooperative competition is not about defeating competitors, because for business, your success doesn't need others ' failure, it's not whether he loses but whether you win. Cooperative competition Thinking and value network mechanism make the boundary of the enterprise become blurred. In order to deal with the dynamic change of environment effectively, the boundary of the enterprise must be adjusted timely.