Accelerating Competitive Effectiveness (ACE)
Distinctiveness
by Rita McGrath
Having a clear sense of purpose and recognizing how an effort drives value empowers people and aligns enterprise energies. Does our work lead to cost savings or revenue gains? Are we aiming for operational efficiencies or innovation? This instrument helps clarify distinctiveness and organizational intention.
Accelerating Competitive Effectiveness is one of the first research-based tools that identify the progress of new capability creation in established organizations
As competitive advantages become shorter and harder to defend, it has never been more important
that organizations create new advantages that can replace those that have eroded. The difficulty is
that metrics for the development of new have until now been idiosyncratic, hard to generalize and nearly
impossible to manage consistently.
With the ACE diagnostics, executives can rapidly assess where a team is in the creation of valuable new
capabilities, identify obstacles and blockages and make timely interventions to accelerate their progress,
reduce risks and increase the potential returns for investments in growth projects.