But if they aren't willing to make those tradeoffs in their strategies, they're destined to become stuck in the middle. They'll inevitably try to do a little bit of everything for a little bit of everybody, and they won't have a competitive advantage. Rarely does sustainable advantage grow out of a single activity in a business. A company doesn't get sustainable advantage simply because it has some unique product design or a unique sales force. Those kind of advantages tend to be visible targets to imitate.
Sustainable advantage comes from systems of activities that are complementary.
For example, if a company has a very good inventory management system, it can also offer faster delivery and do so cheaper than a company without the inventory management system. All those things are consistent, interconnected and mutually reinforcing. As a result, competitors don't have to match just one thing, they have to match the whole system. And until rivals achieve the whole system, they don't get very many of the benefits. In many cases, achieving complementarities across activities is heavily affected by information technology.