From the library
7 Powers
Hamilton Helmer, 2016
In one paragraph
Helmer's attempt to make strategy falsifiable: seven, and only seven, conditions that produce durable differential returns, each with a specific barrier and a specific benefit. The contribution is the discipline of the list, since anything not on it is not a power and will be competed away. Most useful when testing whether an advantage you already have is real. Least useful as a generator of ideas, and the prose is dense to the point of being unfriendly.
Where this sits in the operating system
Compound Leverage
Systems Over Goals
Mental Models & Decision Frameworks
Mental Models & Decision Frameworks
Key insights
A power requires both a benefit and a barrier. Advantage that competitors can copy is not a power, it is a head start.
Only seven qualify. Anything not on the list will be competed away, which makes the list a test rather than a menu.
Power is established during a narrow window of change. Once an industry settles, the opportunity to acquire one has usually closed.
Recognise it early
The failure and the correction sit side by side deliberately. Read the left column asking whether any of it is already true of you.
Chasing growth without barriers
Too many priorities
Copycat strategy
Measuring benefits not barriers
Power dilution via adjacencies
The same idea, argued differently
Adam Smith
Shane Parrish
Daniel Priestley
Eric Jorgenson
The full breakdown
Before you close this
Naming the specific moment you will act roughly doubles the odds you do.
Reference
- Author
- Hamilton Helmer
- Published
- 2016
- Category
- Business
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