Leadership Pure and Simple: How Transformative Leaders Create Winning Organizations

CHAPTER 4Determining the Strategic Heartbeat of the Business

To achieve a dominant position in its selected sandbox in its industry, a company needs to have a strategy that establishes a significant and sustainable point of differentiation—one that enables it to add unique value that competitors will have difficulty duplicating. Of course, most companies have a strategy of some sort. Yet few are able to create a clear definition of that single differentiating factor—if there is one—that has enabled the company to be successful in the past. Still fewer have looked down the road to create a scenario, or strategy, that will enable them to be successful in the environment they will face in the future.

We call that defining factor the Driving Force ...