Striking It Rich

In your own business, it is important to have a clear idea of what your core knowledge is. This is a case where you must take a step back and see the forest, not the trees. The most helpful way of making sense of the huge array of knowledge that exists in any company is to focus on core competencies, specifically:

• Identify: What are your core competencies as an organization? That is, what are the critical knowledge and capabilities that form your competitive advantage?

• Evaluate: Are they as strong as they could/should be? What’s missing?

• Leverage: What problems does your knowledge solve? How can you maximize the value of your knowledge?

This is the kind of thinking that helped UPS realize that one of their core competencies is not just package delivery—it is logistics. They have been teaming up with printer manufacturers like HP that realize that the repair services that they must offer to their customers are at heart a logistical challenge—how to get a printer to a repair center and back at the lowest cost. Logistics is not a core competency of printer manufacturers so it makes sense for many of them to outsource this function.

What are your core competencies? Are you identifying and leveraging them or just waiting for success to bubble up out of the ground? - Michael Oleksak   2007