A principios de la década de 1980, GTE se posicionó para convertirse en un actor importante en la industria de la tecnología de la información. NEC era mucho más pequeña y no tenía experiencia como empresa de telecomunicaciones en funcionamiento. En la actualidad, NEC se encuentra entre las cinco principales empresas de telecomunicaciones, semiconductores y ordenadores centrales. GTE se ha convertido básicamente en una empresa de telefonía con un puesto en productos de defensa e iluminación.
¿Qué ha pasado? NEC creó y fomentó un grupo de competencias fundamentales. GTE, por otro lado, no pudo ponerse de acuerdo en qué competencias basar su estrategia. Se organizó en torno a unidades de negocio estratégicas, que por naturaleza no invierten lo suficiente en las competencias principales, aprisionan los recursos y fomentan la innovación. La competitividad de una empresa se deriva de sus principales competencias y productos principales (los resultados tangibles de las competencias principales).
La competencia principal es el aprendizaje colectivo en la organización, especialmente la capacidad de coordinar las diversas habilidades de producción e integrar flujos de tecnologías. También es un compromiso de trabajar más allá de los límites de la organización. Organizarse en torno a las competencias principales requiere un cambio radical en la organización empresarial.
El primer paso consiste en identificar las competencias principales que cumplan estos tres requisitos: proporcionan un acceso potencial a una amplia variedad de mercados, contribuyen a las ventajas del producto para los clientes y son difíciles de imitar para la competencia. El siguiente paso es rediseñar la arquitectura de la empresa e impulsar el aprendizaje de las alianzas y centrarse en el desarrollo interno. La dirección debería preguntarse: ¿Cuánto tiempo podríamos preservar nuestra competitividad si no controlásemos esta competencia básica? ¿Qué importancia tiene esta competencia fundamental para las ventajas para los clientes? ¿Qué oportunidades se excluirían si perdiéramos esta competencia?
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The Idea in Brief
Diversified giant NEC competed in seemingly disparate businesses—semiconductors, telecommunications, computing, and consumer electronics—and dominated them all.
How? It considered itself not a collection of strategic business units, but a portfolio of core competencies—the company’s collective knowledge about how to coordinate diverse production skills and technologies.
NEC used its core competencies to achieve what most companies only attempt: Invent new markets, exploit emerging ones, delight customers with products they hadn’t even imagined—but definitely needed.
Think of a diversified company as a tree: the trunk and major limbs as core products, smaller branches as business units, leaves and fruit as end products. Nourishing and stabilizing everything is the root system: core competencies.
Focusing on core competencies creates unique, integrated systems that reinforce fit among your firm’s diverse production and technology skills—a systemic advantage your competitors can’t copy.
The Idea in Practice
Clarify Core Competencies
When you clarify competencies, your entire organization knows how to support your competitive advantage—and readily allocates resources to build cross-unit technological and production links. Use these steps:
Articulate a strategic intent that defines your company and its markets (e.g., NEC’s “exploit the convergence of computing and communications”).
Identify core competencies that support that intent. Ask:
- How long could we dominate our business if we didn’t control this competency?
- What future opportunities would we lose without it?
- Does it provide access to multiple markets? (Casio’s core competence with display systems let it succeed in calculators, laptop monitors, car dashboards.)
- Do customer benefits revolve around it? (Honda’s competence with high-revving, lightweight engines offers multiple consumer benefits.)
Build Core Competencies
Once you’ve identified core competencies, enhance them:
Invest in needed technologies. Citicorp trumped rivals by adopting an operating system that leveraged its competencies—and let it participate in world markets 24 hours a day.
Infuse resources throughout business units to outpace rivals in new business development. 3M and Honda won races for global brand dominance by creating wide varieties of products from their core competencies. Results? They built image, customer loyalty, and access to distribution channels for all their businesses.
Forge strategic alliances. NEC’s collaboration with partners like Honeywell gave it access to the mainframe and semiconductor technologies it needed to build core competencies.
Cultivate a Core-Competency Mind-Set
Competency-savvy managers work well across organizational boundaries, willingly share resources, and think long term. To encourage this mind-set:
Stop thinking of business units as sacrosanct. That imprisons resources in units and motivates managers to hide talent as the company pursues hot opportunities.
Identify projects and people who embody the firm’s core competencies. This sends a message: Core competencies are corporate—not unit—resources, and those who embody them can be reallocated. (When Canon spotted opportunities in digital laser printers, it let managers raid other units to assemble talent.)
Gather managers to identify next-generation competencies. Decide how much investment each needs, and how much capital and staff each division should contribute.
The most powerful way to prevail in global competition is still invisible to many companies. During the 1980s, top executives were judged on their ability to restructure, declutter, and de-layer their corporations. In the 1990s, they’ll be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible—indeed, they’ll have to rethink the concept of the corporation itself.
Read more on Strategic analysis or related topics Competitive strategy, Change management and Growth strategy