Anwar Masih, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer at A.T.M Management Consulting passionately argues the case for developing & maintaining your organisation’s Core Competencies & Capabilities, and your organisation’s long-term survival. Furthermore, the lack of Core Competencies & Core Capabilities should be treated as a Major Risk for organisation’s capability to innovate, productivity & performance and ultimately its long-term survival.
Importance of Developing & Integrating Core Competencies - At A.T.M Strategic Management Consulting we agree with Prof. James B. Quinn's assessment (Intelligent Enterprises, 1992) that a firm should focus its strategic investment, management attention, and knowledge & intellectual resources on those Core Competencies where it can achieve and maintain the “best-in-the-world” status benchmark against its competitors.
That means the company must – (1) Develop & integrate its internal Core Competencies to such an extent that it can stay demonstrably ahead of its competitors. (2) Surround its Core Competencies with strategic barriers that keep other competitors & suppliers from replicating them and thus gaining access to its market. (3) Deploy its Core Competencies as widely as possible across the full array of products & services that it offers to its customers. (4) Realign all remaining business activities to serve customer needs most responsively and knowledgeably.
We believe that firms should focus ruthlessly on what they are best at - requiring an honest assessment of both their strengths and weaknesses. If, having looked at its activities, a company concludes that in some areas it will either never achieve 'best in the world' status – or that status, though once achieved, cannot possibly be maintained – it must consider outsourcing those activities.
At A.T.M, Anwar Masih puts it that "Knowledge-based strategy also implies that the firm must deconstruct its generic value chain, so that activities at which the firm is not “best in the world” can be outsourced to a third-party supplier who is “best in the world” at performing that particular activity of the value chain. This, however, of course must be subject to the transaction cost of that activity being substantially lower than that if the firm performed it internally.
The struggle to create/develop Core Competencies needs to focus on the development of essential Core Competencies & practical capabilities & skills of your people. In Strategic Intelligent Enterprises these skills lay the foundations for “Centres-of-Excellence” from which Superior-Performance & Business Value is derived. At A.T.M we call the process of developing these Core Competencies the “Progressive Transformation Process”