ABSTRACT
I t is very difficult to make the kinds of mistake that you can learn from if you stick with custom and practice, with convention and with habitual ways of doing things. Mistakes which arise out of ignorance, care-
lessness and the lack of proper controls or quality assurance are relatively easy to eliminate, though the amount of effort involved can be considerable. But what happens, for example, when competitors increasingly close in to near-perfect standards of quality and production costs are as low as it is physically possible to make them? Where will competitive differentiation come from? It will come from the capacity to continuously improve processes and to identify and market new products and services faster than your competitors. It will also come from the capacity to respond quicker than your competitors in the face of changes in the external market. In other words, competitive differentiation in an increasingly standardized world will come, as Prahalad and Hamel have argued, from the creation of new ideas and turning them into goods and services faster and better than anyone else. 1 An organization can no longer say with complacency, confidence or even conceit (Hartlef) that they have got it right or that things will not change, as they assuredly will, often quicker than they expect.
