# Staying ahead *Ask which improvements competitors will copy* --- In twenty years I haven't been in a single meeting where the senior management team sat around asking which moat to build, or who was attacking the one we had. It's one of those ideas that's more useful as an after-the-fact lens than as a thinking tool for the people inside a business. There's a real nugget of insight in it. Some businesses have one or more mechanisms that protect them from competition, and so protect their returns and ultimately their value. It's a nice picture, and it helps investors explain why certain businesses are worth more than others. My favourite version is Hamilton Helmer's book *7 Powers*, and that's all well and good as far as it goes. Look back at any business that has done well and you can always point to a moat, because whatever made it successful gets called one after the event. As powerful as the imagery is, it comes with limitations, and some of them matter for an operator in particular. You build a moat in peacetime, before you're attacked, knowing what it is and where it has to go. The reality of running a business is that you're protecting it from competitors in real time, and building a moat while you're being attacked is nonsensical: you can't dig it fast enough to stop an attack that has already started. There's only one business in a market with the lowest costs, so until that's you, you don't have that moat. A network of users, where each new one makes the product more useful to the rest, only protects you once it's big enough, and nobody can tell you in advance how big that is. The same goes for how hard it is for customers to switch to a rival: how hard is hard enough? In each case you only find out you had one after the fact. ## Everything is execution Running a business and making it better is the work of building an edge over competitors that lasts. I just don't think the moat is the best picture of how an operator does it. Everything in business is execution, meaning how well you do the work. The art of leadership is working out which improvements will put you ahead of the pack, and which ones every competitor will match in time. Those become table stakes: the minimum you need just to stay in the game. That turns into a question you can ask of any single initiative before you spend on it: could every competitor have this too, and how soon? If they could, it might still be worth doing, but it won't set you apart. ## The unglamorous ones That's why I learn more from case studies of slightly unglamorous businesses than from the frameworks: businesses that at first glance just look efficiently run. What's neat is how their discipline about running things well turns into an edge that lasts. Rivals can't easily copy it, so the advantage doesn't get competed away, or at least not quickly. To me, that's where doing the work well turns into strategy, and it's what operators really need to care about. Michael Porter's famous line is that operational effectiveness isn't strategy, because rivals copy it. Most of it does get copied, and becomes table stakes. The interesting cases are the ones where it doesn't, and looking back you can put a name to what they built. One is [[Building density|density on a delivery route]], fitting more customers onto the same round, which Helmer calls scale economies. Another is execution that rivals can't copy, which he calls process power. The labels only come afterwards, though, and at the time each one was a bet on which bits of execution would still be a lead once everyone else had caught up. Which bits those will be isn't always obvious, and you're constantly having to make those bets.