Competitive Advantage: The Seven Obsessions Method

The Seven Obsessions Method

My book, The Method Method is self-titled the 7 obsessions of how we built our business and when we originally wrote the business plan we knew that we would never be able to survive against such difficult competition by having 1 competitive advantage, we ultimately felt we needed multiple. So where we landed on seven is we tried to find differentiation in the way we do everything across the department. So for us, it is not only applying design and sustainability its also operating with speed because if you’re not going to be the biggest you better be the fastest. It’s about building culture because ultimately process is not going to lead you to innovation, a really great culture will. It’s about relationship retail because at the end of the day we don’t want to be in every store across North America we want to be in the most important stores and we want to have deeper relationships as a competitive advantage within those retailers. So essentially what we did is we looked across the landscape of the business, made sure we had multiple points of differentiation in everything we do and it’s how we built the book to share our lessons.

The way each chapter is set up we talk about opening a macro trend – why this obsession matters to any type of business, how we did it right – in other words, how you could steal from us, how we did it wrong in autopsy because let’s face it we all learn better from mistakes than things that actually worked and then a muse, somebody who does it better than us because there’s always somebody better you could look to for inspiration.