The moment we pop our heads into the world of commerce, everybody teaches us to focus on maintaining your competitive advantage. Swim ahead or drown.

However, what happens if the global commercial climate does not allow you to do that? What happens if an industrial revolution comes along – call it communications or the internet or globalisation – which ensures that anybody can copy you very quickly? What then?

That is the question posed by Rita Gunter McGrath in the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review. Her answer is what she describes as “Transient Advantage“. As she writes, successful business leaders in the current decade “view strategy differently—as more fluid, more customer-centric, less industry-bound. And the ways they formulate it—the lens they use to define the competitive playing field, their methods for evaluating new business opportunities, their approach to innovation—are different as well.”

The author lists eight points that define how to build a successful strategy, based on transient advantage. Significantly, McGrath begins with stressing the need to think about ‘arenas’ rather than industries. She continues by focusing on the importance of building relationships – with customers, suppliers, even competitors.

One paragraph for me stood out:

…..firms can use the logic of “real options” to evaluate new moves. A real option is a small investment that conveys the right, but not the obligation, to make a more significant commitment in the future. It allows the organization to learn through trial and error. Consider the way Intuit has made experimentation a core strategic process, amplifying by orders of magnitude its ability to venture into new spaces and try new things. As Kaaren Hanson, the company’s vice president of design innovation, said at a recent conference at Columbia Business School, the important thing is to “fall in love with the problem you are trying to solve” rather than with the solution, and to be comfortable with iteration as you work toward the answer.

For business mentors, there is a clear message. When you help a client formulate a USP, be aware that this position is liable to change, sooner rather than later. As McGrath concludes, strategy is far from dead. However, it is no longer formulated within a game where the status quo remains in the same place over the long term.