As a business leader gains mastery over their Personal Competitive Forces, their company can grow to a point where its Internal Competitive Forces come into play. This doesn’t mean the Personal Forces need to be mastered before the next levels of competition can be addressed. It’s just easier to face them if the Personal Forces aren’t consuming all of a leader’s time and energy.
In surveys of company CEOs conducted by Chris Zook and James Allen for their book The Founder’s Mentality, they report “… a remarkable 94 percent of barriers [to growth] cited by large-company executives had their roots in internal dysfunction and lack of internal capabilities.”
Some internal forces or barriers have to do with a company’s capacity to deliver on the promises they make to their customers. These capacities are governed by several factors. Among them are the technical competence of the people on board (including the owner), their ability to finance larger jobs or projects, their ability to produce jobs profitably, and their ability to staff and equip their growth. In recent years, many companies have become keenly aware of how their growth is being restricted more by their struggle to hire workers than by their inability to obtain more customers.
In addition to any capacity challenges, there are other internal pressures that pose serious threats to a company’s ability to compete. These include the company’s internal barriers mentioned above, which are things such as poor documentation, ineffective or non-use of digital workflow technology, poor communication inside and outside the company, and personal frictions and discord at all levels of the organization. Barriers or dysfunctions such as these contribute to the inability of people to get along with each other and to work as a team—sometimes even undermining others’ work products.
Creating an unnecessary, sometimes lethal, drag on a company’s ability to grow are inflated egos or an unwillingness of leaders to take responsibility for their actions and decisions. This can become even more complicated when family members are involved, as it’s easy for these relationships to become dysfunctional or even downright toxic. When mom and dad aren’t agreeing, or when parents and their kids are at odds, it doesn’t create a workplace people are drawn to or want to stay. And who has the energy to compete with external competitors when the company’s leaders can’t even get along?
As a company continues to grow, it’s only natural for there to be added levels of complexity to facilitate its growth. While some is inevitable and just part of the growth process, adding unnecessary levels of complexity poses two additional threats: it redirects resources away from a company’s ability to compete and into internal survival and organizational maintenance instead. This, in turn, can cause the company to experience a disconnect with its original purpose—to serve its customers and to fulfill its mission.
The world of business can be brutal, and competition at any level can be unforgiving. When a company fails to recognize or manage its Internal Competitive Forces, the best strategy for outside competitors is often just to patiently wait long enough for them to exhaust themselves into insignificance.
