stop looking to the competition. Value-innovate and let the competition worry about you. - Michael E. Porter

Executives are paralyzed by the muddle. Few employees deep down in the company even know what the strategy is. And a closer look reveals that most plans don’t contain a strategy at all but rather a smorgasbord of tactics that individually make sense but collectively don’t add up to a unified, clear direction that sets a company apart — let alone makes the competition irrelevant. Does this sound like the strategic plans in your company?

An Incoherent Strategy When a company’s value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti — a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as “low-high-low-low-high-low-high” — it signals that the company doesn’t have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos.

to win in the future, companies must stop competing with each other. The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.