Strategy.

The framework

1. 01

   Inventory what you hold — and cut everything that's rented.

   List the business's resources — cash, brand, proprietary data, licences, locations, relationships — and its capabilities: the things it does repeatably well that don't depend on any single person staying. Then apply the first honest filter: anything a competitor could acquire with a purchase order or a job offer is rented, not owned, and comes off the list — the software you subscribe to, the agency you brief, the channel you buy. What remains is usually shorter and stranger than the list you would show an investor, and that is the sign you are finally looking at the right things.

2. 02

   Run the survivors through the four tests — most will fall at rare.

   Valuable asks whether the resource lets you serve customers or blunt threats in a way someone pays for; rare asks whether your competitors plainly hold it too. The second test is where flattering inventories collapse: strong team, quality product and great service appear on every rival's website, which makes them the entry fee for the industry rather than an advantage in it. Table stakes still matter — losing them is fatal — but they must be maintained quietly, not built upon, because strategy built on ground everyone owns defends nothing.

3. 03

   Interrogate inimitable — history, ambiguity and complexity are the only real walls.

   Barney identified why some resources resist copying even after patents lapse and features get cloned within a quarter. Path dependence: your position was built through a history a rival cannot rerun — the decade of customer data, the early partnership, the compounding reputation. Causal ambiguity: neither you nor your competitor can fully specify why the thing works, so it cannot be specified into their project plan. Social complexity: trust, culture and relationships, which money can only buy slowly. The rule of thumb is blunt — anything a consultant can document, a competitor can implement; what they cannot document is what you defend.

4. 04

   Fix the O — an unorganised advantage earns nothing.

   The last test is the one operators skip: is the business actually organised to capture the value of what it holds? Xerox PARC invented much of modern computing — the graphical interface, the mouse, ethernet — and Xerox, organised around copiers, captured almost none of it; the value went to companies built to exploit what it had built. Audit whether your rarest resource has a process, an owner and a revenue line attached, then let the resource choose your battles: enter the markets your resources give you a right to win, rather than the markets that merely look attractive from outside. Five forces tells you whether an industry is worth winning; the resource-based view tells you whether you are the one who will win it.