Sometimes in a course on strategic management, there's a heavy focus on developing a mission, and a vision, and a vision statement, and then a mission statement for the organization. And certainly that is not an invalid approach. And I would not try to persuade anyone away from trying to create such a mission statement. I think you'll find though, in this course we're not going to spend very much time at all focusing on that. A lot of you, when you think of the word strategy or strategic management, you think of strategic planning. And you think of future-oriented attempts to, to plan over a horizon of three, or five, or ten, or 20 years. And you think of a big plan with, then, tactics to help that plan be achieved. Or you think of the mission statement, which is a concise description of the, the organization or the company and it's reason for existence and it's, it's mission and what it's trying to accomplish. In my experience, and I don't know if you've had the same experience that process can be sometimes valuable depending on how the company or organization approaches it. I've found some organizations spend a lot of time just trying to find the right words to describe the, the company and then ignore the statement over the long term. And so I probably would not be one to spend a lot of time advising companies to worry about that. What I think you'll find we do more in this course is trying to help companies perhaps in establish an identity. But even more than that, establish something we call competitive advantage. And to go even further than that, sustainable competitive advantage. And I would, I would argue that companies should probably spend a lot more time trying to analyze what it is that is their competitive advantage and understand it and how it adds value to customers. And how they can develop new competitive advantages, how they can nurture and maintain existing ones. And that is also very future-oriented, it's not, it's not that we shouldn't focus on the future. By definition strategy is future-oriented. But we won't spend a lot of time telling you how to create a strategic plan. We won't tell you step one develop a mission statement. Instead we'll focus on something that's a lot harder, in my estimation and observation, to identify, which is competitive advantage. And competitive advantage can be described or defined in a lot of ways. But if you look at, at the two words competitive advantage you're assuming that there is some market or sector or industry with multiple players or multiple competitors. And you're seeking to have some advantage over those competitor that adds value in the minds and wallets of customers. You have some value added some value proposition, we say in business terms, that that persuades them to choose you as a company over a competitor. In many competitive settings, there are competitive advantages. In politics, in for example. Whether it be more physically talented athletes in a sporting situation or a better plan devised by the coach. Planning is not ignored here. Whether it be a more compelling ex set of experience in a political campaign. Giving advantage to one candidate over another. There could be lots of reasons for competitive vantage but that's what we're going to try to help you develop in your own business with the frameworks that we use. And that's what we're going to argue or I'm going to argue is really the predictor of success. Do you have some competitive advantage? Now I will truthfully admit that I can't tell you, this is the step one. And then this is step two that you need to follow to develop a competitive advantage. We are a lot better all of us, whether it's consultants or academics or journalists. At describing what competitive advantages are rather than helping you, necessarily go through some, step-by-step formula to develop competitive advantage. What we are telling you though is that you'd better get a competitive advantage if you hope to succeed in business. And if you hope to sur, survive at making money, at turning a profit, you need to have something that we would call a sustainable competitive advantage. Something that competitors will have a hard time imitating. Will have a hard time investing in and developing their own version of. And so competitive advantages can be a lot of different things. They can be brand names, which again take, it takes a lot of time to develop a brand name. It could be unique locations that are very convenient depending on the type of business you've developed. It could be some innovative piece of intellectual property that you develop. For example think of a phora, s, pharmaceutical company that develops some drug treatment for a disease. That is a unique set of advantages that, that company will have in the market place. That probably will be difficult to compete against. And so, were trying to help companies individuals, entrepreneurs identify the sources of their competitive advantages. And hope that that process of analysis and identifying will help you develop new, new competitive advantages. In economics terms if you've ever taken an economics class, the the case exists for a perfect market. Now, that's probably just a theory. But if you think back to your economic classes where you talk about a perfect market, in a perfect market there is no such thing as a competitive advantage. All companies are exactly identical and the product is the commodity or, in other words, there's no differentiating factor. And there's no reason for any individual customer to chose one company over the other. In such a perfect market you'll find if, if it were to exist there's no incentive for entrepreneurs to come into a market, into that market. Right? Because there's zero market po, zero profit potential. Every company's identical. The profit level has been competed down to zero. And there's no point of differentiation. There's no advantage. So what we're arguing for, and assuming, you know, from an economics perspective, is that there are imperfect markets that are not perfectly competitive. With different companies that have unique sets of resources and the ability to develop unique advantages. And that's what attracts entrepreneurs like yourselves to come into the market is that, that hope or promise, the potential of what we call technical terms abnormal or super normal profits. Which is something above zero, right, from an economics perspective. And, so, any of you who hopes to start a business sees some niche or some imperfection in a market that you would like to take advantage of. Something that doesn't yet exist, a product or service, in perhaps a particular way, and you hope to exploit that In a non-perfectly competitive market. And so there's, there's that profit again that's why we define success in terms of profit. And our focus again will be developing this uniqueness or this differentiation which is competitive advantage. And so this will end module one. In module two, we'll pick things back up and we'll be looking specifically at one model or framework for understanding competitive advantage. And how companies and industries develop these competitive advantages internally and how they lead to profits or success in the specific case of that business or the other. Thank you very much. We'll see you back next time.
