Managing Assets and Skills: The Key to a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Long-term success involves creating, managing, and exploiting assets and skills that competitors find difficult to match or counter. This involves a three-step process. The first step is to identify relevant skills and assets by observing successful and unsuccessful firms, key customer motivations, large value-added items, and mobility barriers. The second step is to select those skills and assets that will provide an advantage over competitors, will be relevant to the market, and will be feasible, sustainable, and appropriate for the furture. The third step is to develop and maintain those assets and skills and to neutralize those of competitors.