Doing things better than rivals is not a strategy. Real competitive advantage rests on a deliberate, defensible choice to be different, and an explicit willingness to give up something in order to hold it.

Competing on Purpose is a practitioner’s survey of the discipline required to make that choice and hold it: analyzing industry structure honestly, choosing a genuine generic strategy, auditing resources and capabilities against both the positioning and resource-based lenses, gathering real competitive intelligence, recognizing disruption’s specific mechanics, finding uncontested market space, reasoning through rivals’ rational responses, building durable moats, planning under real uncertainty, executing through structure and incentives, and renewing the strategy before events force the change under worse conditions.