Four building blocks of competitive advantages-
1. Efficiency: To determine how efficiently they are using organizational resources, managers must be able to measure accurately how many units of inputs (raw materials, human resources, and so on) are being used to produce a unit of output. They must also be able to measure the number of units of outputs (goods and services) they produce.
2. Quality: Today, competition often revolves around increasing the quality of goods and services. In the car industry, for example, with each price range, car competes against one another in terms of their features, designs and reliability.
3. Innovation: strategic can help to raise the level of innovations in an organization. Successful innovation takes place when managers create an organizational setting in which employees feel empowered to be creative and authority is decentralized to employees so that they feel free to experiment and take risks.
4. Responsiveness to customers: Finally, strategic managers can help to make their organizations more responsive to customers if they develop a control system that allows them to evaluate how well employees with customer contact and performing their jobs. Monitoring employees’ behavior can help managers to find the ways to increase employees’ performance level, perhaps by revealing areas in which skills training can help employees or by finding new procedures that allow employees to perform their job better.
