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COMPETITIVE STRATEGY
Strategy Is About BothResources and Positioningby Roger L. Martin
APRIL 27, 2015
Anyone taking the time to delve into the literature of strategy quickly realizes that there are
two ercely opposed camps.
In the red corner we have the positioning school (TPS) and in the white we have the
resource-based view of the rm (RBV). Michael Porter is credited with (or more often
accused of) creating TPS in 1980positing that a rm should think about positioning itself
in its industry in a way that enables it to achieve competitive advantage.
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Strategies for staying ahead.
The RBV view, rst articulated by Berger
Wernerfelt in 1984 and then by Jay Barney in
1986 and 1991, put forward a view of
competitive advantage as based on
accumulating competitive resources. The
main (though not only) criticism it levels at
TPS is that for positioning to work, market
structures have to be stableand they are not. RBV argues that in an increasingly unstable
world, the possession of valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources is a
more reliable key to competitive success.
To date, RBV has been winning the battle in the academic community, but its market share
in the world of strategy practice is low, despite having been taught to three decades worth
of MBA students.
Personally, I see this as just another example of how either/or is a false and unhelpful trade-
o. Real strategies in the real world combine TPS and RBV. Positioning and resources arent
opposites so much as two sides of the same coin.
Think about it. Attempting to stake out an advantaged position in a given
market/industry/arena without thinking about the resources necessary to support the
advantage is clearly a stupid idea. But equally stupid is to think that one can develop a
valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resource outside the context of a
particular position in a particular market/industry/arena. No advantage I have ever seen is
independent of a distinctive set of capabilities and no resource that I have ever seen is
competitively valuable independent of context.
It is unarguable that you need both. You need a where-to-play and a how-to-win. They
have to be a matched pair. Strategy, at its heart, is about positioning and resources
together. The art of strategy is in toggling back and forth between the two to nd a
positioning that exploits resources to create an advantage that endures enough to justify
the resource investment in the rst place.
Roger L. Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Premiers Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness andAcademic Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of
Toronto in Canada. He is the co-author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and of the Playing to Win
Strategy Toolkit. For more information, including events with Roger, click here.
Related Topics: STRATEGY
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