1. Positions and Opportunities > 1. Understanding Positions > 3. Position StrengthWhich of the following best describes what you need to know about values and strength?
I need to better understand how positions are analyzed on the basis of their elemental components. (A free article with some of the basics is available to guests here ). 1.3 Elemental Analysis 1.3 Elemental Analysis
"Your skill comes from five factors.
Study these factors when you plan war.
You must insist on knowing your situation." Sun Tzu's The Art of War 1:1:6-8
Situation:
The strategic challenge is to find methods to make faster decisions in highly complex environments. In these complex, fast-changing environments, the human mind cannot deal with the vast amounts of detailed information (Free article on the information problem here ). Literally thousands of factors can come into play in a given competitive situation. Multiple agents affect our positions. We don't even necessarily know those actors or their actions. We simply feel the affect of their decisions. Still, we must make decisions every day. We are never going to have time to collect and analyze all the data we want to make those decisions. Many bad decisions are simply unavoidable. The only way to find out that they are bad is to make them.
I need to understand the motivations that drive a position in a certain direction.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."
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.
I need to understand the how core values create strong positions .1.7 Competitive Power 1.7 Competitive Power
"Manage to avoid battle until your organization can count on certain victory."
You must calculate many advantages."
Situation:
How we determine if one strategic position is superior to another? How do we predict which strategic position will triumph in a comparison with competing positions? Our expectations are often very wrong. We expect larger organizations to be successful. We also expect organizations that have been successful in the past to continue to be successful in the future. We also expect the volume of resources used to have an impact. The problem is that these factors have very little effect on competitive outcomes. Size and wealth are the result of past success, but that success may have little relationship with the current mission. Sun Tzu teaches that size is not power and that past success is not momentum. In the real world, smaller forces often triumph over larger ones. Newer organizations often overcome established ones. Vast resources are often squandered in failed endeavors. This meant that something deeper was going on, something that isn't obvious to most of us without training.
