Hamilton Helmer
Hamilton Helmer is one of the world's leading experts on business strategy and the author of the seminal book 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, which provides a comprehensive framework for understanding what it really takes to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. With more than three decades of experience in the strategic consulting industry, Hamilton has advised over 200 companies—from burgeoning startups to Fortune 100 giants—on how to identify, build, and leverage their unique strategic powers.
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Execution and operational excellence are necessary for survival but do not constitute a strategy because they lack the structural barriers required to prevent imitation.
"You're on a treadmill and if you stop running on that treadmill, you get creamed, but it's not power. The things that drive operational excellence can be mimicked."
Long-term viability is determined by identifying underlying structural characteristics that can create "power" well before a company achieves product-market fit.
"At the earlier stage, you can imagine wildly more degrees of freedom and the questions are of the business propositions that you're thinking of in trying to get to product-market fit, what are the und..."
Startups must sequence their strategy based on the business lifecycle, focusing on moats like counter-positioning that are available early rather than mature advantages like branding or process power.
"So in a book there's a thing called power progression, which says there are... It tells over the cycle of a business, there are times when certain types of power are available and the converse of that..."