Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Chapter 44

The Hardball Manifesto

George Stalk, Jr. and Rob Lachenauer

This chapter is based on the authors' 2004 book, Hardball: Are You Playing to Win or Playing to Play?, published by Harvard Business School Press.

The winners in business have always played hardball. When companies play hardball, they use every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors. When they achieve competitive advantage, they attract more customers, gain market share, boost profits, reward their employees, and weaken their competitors' positions. Then they reinvest their gains in their businesses to improve product quality, expand their offerings, and sharpen their processes to further strengthen their competitive advantage.

When they can continue this virtuous cycle of activity for a prolonged period, companies can transform their competitive advantage into a position even more powerful and desirable: they can achieve decisive advantage. With that, they put themselves into a far more powerful and influential position than just that of the market leader. They can use their decisive advantage to bring about fundamental change in an entire industry, put their competitors into a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still.

Winning through competitive ...