The stronger a company's financial performance and market position, the more likely it has a well-conceived, well-executed strategy.

SWOT analysis is a simple but powerful tool for sizing up a company's resource capabilities and deficiencies, its market opportunities, and the external threats to its future well-being.

A company's resource strengths represent competitive assets and are big determinants of its competitiveness and ability to succeed in the marketplace.

A competence is an activity that a company has learned to perform well.

A core competence is a competitively important activity that a company performs better than other internal activities.

A distinctive competence is a competitively important activity that a company performs better than its rivals—it thus represents a competitively superior resource strength.

A distinctive competence is a competitively potent resource strength for three reasons: (1) it gives a company competitively valuable capability that is unmatched by rivals, (2) it can underpin and add real punch to a company's strategy, and (3) it is a basis for sustainable competitive advantage.

A company's ability to succeed in the marketplace hinges to a considerable extent on the competitive power of its resources—the set of competencies, capabilities, and competitive assets at its command.

A company's resource strengths represent competitive assets; its resource weaknesses represent competitive liabilities. A company is well advised to pass on a particular market opportunity unless it has or can acquire the resources to capture it.

Simply making lists of a company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is not enough; the payoff from SWOT analysis comes from the conclusions about a company's situation and the implications for strategy improvement that flow from the four lists.

The higher a company's costs are above those of close rivals, the more competitively vulnerable it becomes.

A company's value chain identifies the primary activities that create customer value and the related support activities.

A company's cost-competitiveness depends not only on the costs of internally performed activities (its own value chain) but also on costs in the value chains of its suppliers and forward channel allies.

Benchmarking is a potent tool for learning which companies are best at performing particular activities and then using their techniques (or “best practices”) to improve the cost and effectiveness of a company's own internal activities.

Benchmarking the costs of company activities against rivals provides hard evidence of whether a company is cost-competitive.

Performing value chain activities in ways that give a company the capabilities to either outmatch the competencies and capabilities of rivals or else beat them on costs are two good ways to secure competitive advantage.

A weighted competitive strength analysis is conceptually stronger than an unweighted analysis because of the inherent weakness in assuming that all the strength measures are equally important.

High competitive strength ratings signal a strong competitive position and possession of competitive advantage; low ratings signal a weak position and competitive disadvantage.

A company's competitive strength scores pinpoint its strengths and weaknesses against rivals and point directly to the kinds of offensive/ defensive actions it can use to exploit its competitive strengths and reduce its competitive vulnerabilities.

Zeroing in on the strategic issues a company faces and compiling a “worry list” of problems and roadblocks creates a strategic agenda of problems that merit prompt managerial attention.

Actually deciding upon a strategy and what specific actions to take is what comes after developing the list of strategic issues and problems that merit front-burner management attention.

A good strategy must contain ways to deal with all the strategic issues and obstacles that stand in the way of the company's financial and competitive success in the years ahead.