Beyond Competitiveness

Stop chasing competitiveness. Align people to create real value, build ability, and power will follow as a side effect. Ability, not rivalry, is the real moat.

If you listen to how people in companies talk, you hear a certain word a lot: competitive.

“We need to stay competitive.”

“This feature will make us more competitive.”

“These cuts are necessary to remain competitive.”

No one ever stops to ask what that actually means. Competitive at what? Competitive for whom? You never hear a customer say, “I chose this product because the company is very competitive.” They say, “It works,” or “It’s easier,” or “I trust them.”

Competitiveness is mostly how companies talk to themselves. It’s an internal slogan that often substitutes for a clear idea.

And that’s the problem. When you make “being competitive” the goal, you’ve already gone slightly off course. You start optimizing for the wrong thing.

The real sequence in a healthy system is:

Alignment → Ability → Power.

If you get people aligned, the system gains ability: it can do things in the world. From the outside, that looks like power. That’s what people later call “being very competitive.”

But that power is a by-product. If you try to aim directly at power or competitiveness, you usually get politics instead of ability, and fear instead of alignment.

It was never really about competition. It was always about value creation.

The Wrong Objective

Competitiveness sounds serious and hard-headed. It feels like the sort of thing good managers are supposed to worry about. Markets are competitive, so we should be too.

But look at the actual behavior the word produces.

When a leader says, “We need to be more competitive,” what happens inside the company?

• Teams rush to match whatever features a rival just shipped.

• Sales wants discounts approved faster “so we don’t lose deals to X.”

• HR starts salary arms races: “We’re losing talent to Y; we have to match their comp.”

• Strategy becomes watching competitors instead of watching users.

None of this necessarily creates new value. Much of it is just shuffling the same value around, at higher cost. Economists have a name for that: deadweight loss. It’s the heat you get from friction when two systems push against each other instead of moving something forward.

A lot of what companies call “trying to remain competitive” is just manufacturing friction.

Now contrast that with a different question:

Instead of “How do we stay competitive?” ask

“What ability do we need that we don’t have yet?”

That sounds almost banal, but it produces very different behaviors:

• “We need the ability to ship safely every week, not every quarter.”

• “We need the ability to help customers go live in one day, not one month.”

• “We need the ability to learn from every mistake once, not repeatedly.”

Those are concrete. You can build them. And once you have them, you don’t have to talk quite so much about being competitive, because the result is obvious to anyone watching.

Ability is the new paradigm, especially in a digital world where opportunity is more democratized than ever. Infrastructure that used to be rare—compute, distribution, even capital—is now abundant or at least accessible. The scarce thing is the ability to use it well.

Value Creation vs Value Capture

Economically, there’s a simple way to see what’s wrong with competitiveness as an objective.

In any market, there are two different games:

1. Value creation — making the pie bigger.

2. Value capture — fighting over how much of the pie you get.

When people talk about being competitive, they usually mean the second game. More market share. Better margins. Better rankings. Those are capture metrics.

But the most interesting things in the last few decades of tech didn’t come from companies that tried to be a bit more competitive inside an existing box. They came from people who made new boxes.

That’s what value creation looks like: you don’t fight over the existing pie; you bake a different one. Sometimes you invent the idea of dessert.

The more you obsess over competitiveness, the more your attention gets pulled sideways, toward other players in the game, and away from the actual opportunity in front of you.

You’re like a runner who spends the whole race looking left and right at the other runners instead of looking at the track.

What happens to most runners who do that? They trip.

The Toxic Side of Competitiveness

Calling competitiveness “toxic” isn’t just a rhetorical flourish. It has a specific meaning.

When competitiveness becomes the goal, three toxic things happen inside organizations:

1. You get internal zero-sum games.
   Teams start competing with each other rather than aligning around a shared mission. They hoard information, duplicate work, and optimize their local metrics even if it hurts the whole.

2. You reward signaling over substance.
   People learn to look competitive: long hours, aggressive postures, dramatic language about “crushing it.” The easiest way to appear competitive is to attack other people’s plans. It’s much harder, and slower, to quietly build ability.

3. You shift from curiosity to fear.
   Competitiveness framed as survival (“We’ll die if we’re not competitive”) pushes people into defensive thinking. Defensive thinking is coordinated around not losing, not around figuring out what’s possible.

In other words, competitiveness rewards the people who are best at fighting over the steering wheel, not the ones who are best at driving the car.

Alignment does the opposite. It makes the steering wheel less interesting and the road more interesting.

Why Alignment Is the Real Multiplier

Think about what alignment actually does to a group.

Take ten talented people. If each is pursuing their own idea of what matters, their abilities mostly cancel out. One builds; another unbuilds. One sells something the other can’t deliver. One optimizes for short-term metrics, another for long-term ones. The net ability of the group is often less than the ability of the best individual.

Now take ten moderately talented people but align them tightly around a real problem and a clear direction. Suddenly they get multiplicative effects:

• Work done in one place reduces work elsewhere.

• Information learned in one customer conversation benefits all.

• The same piece of infrastructure supports multiple features.

On paper, nothing changed about their individual abilities. But collectively they can do far more than the misaligned talented team.

That’s the real function of alignment: it turns individual ability into system ability.

And once a system has enough ability, it starts to look powerful. From the outside, people will say “they’re very competitive.” But notice the order:

It’s not competitive → powerful → able.

It’s aligned → able → powerful.

If you try to shortcut that by optimizing for power directly, you usually skip the alignment and ability part, and then the power is fake. It’s positional power, not functional power. You can demand, but you can’t do.

Power vs Ability in the Digital World

Power and ability used to be more tightly coupled.

In the industrial age, if you controlled capital, distribution, or regulation, you had power. If you owned the factory, the railroads, or the license, you could decide who participated in the market.

In that environment, it made some sense to think strategically in “power” terms. Power was a real bottleneck.

But the digital world rearranged that landscape. Cloud platforms mean you don’t need to own a data center. App stores and the web mean you don’t need to own a physical distribution channel. Remote work means you don’t need everyone within driving distance of your HQ.

The world is not perfectly democratized, but it’s vastly more open than it was. The number of people who can “enter the game” keeps going up.

In that environment, traditional power buys you less and less. You can’t rely on:

• Gatekeeping distribution, because there are new gates.

• Controlling information, because information routes around obstacles.

• Owning talent, because talent is more mobile.

What still compounds is ability: the ability to build, learn, adapt, and coordinate.

If you bet on power, you’re betting on making the world hold still. If you bet on ability, you’re betting you can move with the world.

History is pretty clear which bet tends to win.

The Firm as an Alignment Device

Economists have this idea that firms exist to reduce transaction costs. If every interaction between people had to be negotiated in a market, it would be too slow and expensive. So we form companies: islands of planning in a sea of markets.

That’s a dry way of saying something simple: a company is a coordination hack.

It says: instead of a bunch of individuals competing with each other constantly (in the strict market sense), let’s align and act together.

Which makes it ironic that some companies try to reintroduce constant competition inside the organization.

Metrics for everything. Rankings. Stack-ranking. Internal markets for budget. Teams bidding against each other for the same projects.

If constant competition was actually the most efficient way to produce value, we wouldn’t need firms at all. We’d all be freelancers in an anarchic bazaar. The reason firms exist is that coordination (which is a nicer name for alignment) does better.

So when someone tries to increase “competitiveness” by pitting teams against each other, they’re undoing the main reason the company exists in the first place.

The Ability Position

If you strip away slogans, strategy is mostly a question of position: where you stand relative to opportunities and constraints.

A “power position” is about where you sit in the hierarchy or the network. Do you control a standard? Do you lock in users? Do you own an irreplaceable asset?

A lot of classic strategy talk lives there.

An ability position is more subtle. It’s about what you can do on short notice.

• How quickly can you respond to a new need from users?

• How easily can you repurpose what you’ve already built for a new context?

• How cheaply can you test whether some idea works?

• How well can you survive a big shift (technology, regulation, user expectations)?

If your ability position is strong, you don’t have to defend the same hill forever. You can move. You can give up one position to take a better one.

This is what many people miss about “agility.” It’s not about moving fast in general. It’s about having the ability to reconfigure yourself with relatively low cost when reality changes.

Competitiveness as an objective tends to produce people who dig in and defend their current hill (“we must defend our competitive position”). Ability as an objective produces people who ask, “Is this still the right hill?”

Measuring the Right Shadow

You don’t ignore competition completely. You still watch what others are doing, the way a sailor watches the weather. You don’t control the wind, but it matters.

The mistake is to treat the weather as your objective.

Competitiveness is a shadow metric. It’s the visible outline of something else: your ability to create value in a way that others can’t or won’t.

If you obsess over the shadow, you start contorting yourself to make it look bigger, instead of becoming the kind of thing that naturally casts a large shadow.

It’s like a student who cares more about having “good grades” than about understanding the subject. Eventually they optimize for the measurement instead of the thing it was supposed to measure.

In companies, that leads to:

• Copycat roadmaps (“Competitor has X; we need X”).

• Shallow differentiation (“We’re the Y for Z”).

• Short-term stunts to hit quarterly numbers.

The paradox is that many of the companies that look most “uncompetitive” at first—because they ignore the main race and build something orthogonal—end up with the strongest position later.

They weren’t trying to win the existing game. They were trying to become extremely good at doing something specific for a specific set of people. In other words, they were building ability.

Beyond Competitiveness

If you go far enough with this line of thought, you end up with a surprisingly simple rule:

Don’t optimize for power. Don’t optimize for competitiveness.

Optimize for the ability to create value, and for the alignment that lets that ability compound.

Everything else—market share, brand strength, valuation, “competitiveness”—is downstream of that.

You can test this in your own life.

If you focus on being “competitive” in your career, you start thinking in zero-sum ways: other people’s success threatens you. You game performance systems. You chase titles.

If you focus on ability—what you can actually do—you end up spending more time learning hard things, practicing, and finding environments where your abilities are useful. Other people’s ability becomes an asset rather than a threat, because you can align with them.

The same pattern scales up to companies, and even to countries.

As the digital world keeps opening up, the cost of trying to dominate others goes up, and the return on building real ability goes up. You can no longer easily force the world to give you what you want, but you can become unusually good at making things the world wants.

So going “beyond competitiveness” doesn’t mean ignoring reality or pretending markets aren’t competitive. It means:

• You see competitiveness as a symptom of doing the right things, not the thing you aim at.

• You treat power as a side effect of alignment and ability, not as a god to be worshipped.

• You measure yourself by the value you create and the abilities you’re building, not by how scared your competitors seem.

If you get that right, you’ll be competitive almost by accident. But by the time people start calling you that, you’ll know it was never really about competition. It was about what you were able to do together.