Your first job as a strategist is to be better than your competitors at the things that matter most to your customers. This sounds simple enough, but here’s the thing: in most cases, this means you’ll also have to be worse than your competitors at other things, ideally the less important ones. A major lesson of our decade of research on service companies—we wrote a book about this idea—is that organizations that resist and try to be great at everything usually end up in a state of “exhausted mediocrity.”2 Sound familiar?
