The skills we aren’t taught, and how you can expand your leadership through leveraging them

Our leadership models are changing — from command and control to questioning and discovery. You can learn to develop these skills and improve your capability as a leader.

How do you sustain your competitive advantage as an individual or organizational leader? How can you grow, succeed, and stay ahead?

All competitive advantages have a life cycle. There’s the period during which a new advantage is created — through innovation, acquisition, mergers or whatever. Then there is the period when we get to exploit an existing advantage — in other words, a profitable business is in place and our job is to operate it. Then, when an advantage is exhausted, there is the task of transforming the business to operate on the next advantage or risk it becoming irrelevant.

The graphic below shows these different stages. Here’s the dilemma. The period of time when an advantage is in the “exploit” stage is getting shorter and shorter in much of our economy. Consider the fate of so many of the much-heralded “direct to consumer” companies that began sprouting up everywhere in the 2010’s. Take Casper, the heavily promoted mattress-in-a-box company. While it was one of the first to offer that product and market it in a catchy way, by the time it went public, the mattress market was saturated, hundreds of other…