The Strategy Pathfinder, 3rd Edition

5Resource-Based Advantage

This land is me: rock, water, animal, tree; they are my song.

Aboriginal tracker in the Australian film One Night the Moon by Kev Carmody

#Ilovebarca! Spend any time at all in the Catalan city of Barcelona and you’ll sense a special relationship between its citizens and its football club, Barcelona FC. That team is them and they are a part of the team. The city has a spring in its step the morning after a win (especially against Real Madrid!). And even if the team suffers from a bad run of form, while Barcelona’s citizens will complain, they will never allow outsiders to criticise. The team is like family.

While a football team may be an extreme example of how deep roots and connections are an important part of an organisation’s strategic DNA, we are beginning to develop a greater recognition of the importance of historical relationship between organisations, their stakeholders and their locations. From phone makers, to auto companies, to craft brewers, organisations everywhere are now seeking to appreciate and understand how their history and their relationships with stakeholders and other assets can be seen as valuable and rare strengths – unique inimitable strengths not easily circumvented by their competitors.

This is a different perspective from the view of how an organisation develops strategic advantage from that outlined in the previous chapter. In the chapter on Competitive Advantage, the strategist was like a designer who could make whatever ...