8.5. The Courage to Be Different
It requires a lot of courage to buck so much conventional management wisdom and practice, regardless of what the actual evidence shows. That is why sustainable competitive advantage is so difficult to achieve. Everyone wants to earn exceptional returns but to do it by doing what everyone else does and in the same way, too. What our investigation of truly innovative, entrepreneurial, and high-performing companies reveals is that they don't do what everyone else does. And they have leaders, at all levels of the organization, with the wisdom and courage to know what to do and to do it. The challenge, of course, is to take these insights and act on them. Knowledge, by itself, is not enough.
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