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What Is 'Barrier to Competition'?

Don't focus on competing, focus on delivering more value. Every improvement you make builds a Barrier to Competition making it more difficult for competitors to keep up.

The more time you spend looking at the competition, the less time you have to build your business.

Every improvement you make to your Value Stream, makes it harder for your competition to follow.

Josh Kaufman Explains 'Barrier to Competition'

How much attention are you paying to what your competitors are doing? The more time and energy you spend following your competition, the less time and energy you have to actually build your business.

Think of a company like Apple-there's no other company in the technology world that focuses less on keeping up with what other companies are providing. Instead, they focus on building something completely new and Remarkable, then perfecting it as much as possible. Apple's competitors, on the other hand, seem to be locked in a never-ending scramble to keep up.

After Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Blackberry scrambled to create the Storm, which replicated many of the same features. By the time the Storm launched, the iPhone had already gone through several Iteration Cycles, making it very difficult for Blackberry to compete. To date, Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones worldwide.

In the same vein, instead of trying to compete directly with commodity laptop manufacturers like Asus, HP, and Dell in the netbook category (small, low-powered computers designed for portability), Apple conspicuously avoided the market for years. That changed when the iPad was launched in 2010 - an offer that redefined the market instead of competing with pre-existing netbooks on features. In the first two months of its existence, the company sold over 2 million units.

By choosing to innovate instead of compete, Apple successfully captured a leadership share of a very competitive market.

Every improvement you make to your Value Stream makes it harder for potential competitors to keep up. By increasing your ability to create and deliver value efficiently and effectively, you're simultaneously making it more difficult for competitors to compete with you by doing what you're doing. Every benefit you deliver and every customer you serve makes it harder for competitors to replicate you.

Don't focus on competing-focus on delivering even more value. Your competition will take care of itself.

Questions About 'Barrier to Competition'

• Are you worrying too much about what your competition is doing?
• What would happen if you stopped competing and focused that energy on delivering even more value instead? * -----

"Don't compete with rivals - make them irrelevant."

W. Chan Kim, co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy

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