This begs the question of what we mean by “advancing your position.” Sun Tzu identified five factors that make up your position. Improving on them advances your position. These five include mission, ground, heaven, command, and methods. Here is a brief definition of each and how you can improve upon them to advance your position.

1. MISSION: Get more and more people to accept your philosophy, mission, or see you as having the higher moral standard than your competitors.
2. COMMAND: Convince more and more people that your leadership is better. This can happen in five ways:
a. You are more trustworthy.
b. You are smarter in terms of learning what your customers want and need.
c. You care more about achieving your mission rather than just money.
d. You have the courage to face the bad times (take action) without freezing or fleeing.
e. You can handle the excess of command when power is granted to you.
3. GROUND: Take more land or customers (converts).
4. METHODS: Make your team of people work better together, communicate better, and be more efficient. Your people are seen as better trained and more professional.
5. HEAVEN: You have no control over this aspect, but it effects you. Do the “times” support your endeavor more or less than your competitor. How often do we hear of people that are “behind the times” or even “ahead of their time?” The result in both cases is the same – failure. It’s biggest relationship is to the courage of the leader as identified above.

These five are always a comparison to your competitors. They are meaningless without something by which to compare them against. They have no objective measure or value. People gravitate toward what they perceive to “better.” The key word here is “perceive.” It may not be real. At first, it’s often a façade, but over time it becomes real.

Put it to Work: The first thing you must do is determine where you are right now in comparison to your competitors. Naturally, it will be different for each competitor so you will have to compare yourself to all of them.

Fist, ask yourself who gets higher marks or more buy-in on the mission of the company. You or your competitor?

Second, ask yourself who gets higher marks for their command. You or your competitor?

Third, ask yourself who gets higher marks for having the most customers? Many people like to be with the “in” crowd.

Fourth, who has better methods?

Finally, who is better supported by the business climate or the emotional fad of the day?

If you honestly rate yourself against your competitor the current winner is obvious. You will notice that it’s not just who has more tally marks in each area, it is also affected by which is most important at the time of comparison. In some industries such as fashion, “heaven” or the emotional trends of the time are far more important than other factors and should receive higher consideration. You may want to establish a factor analysis before doing your comparison to keep you honest.

With the results of your analysis in hand, you are able to determine where you should focus your strategy to advance your position. You must be at least equal in all areas and better in the one that counts to win.

What is your natural reaction when faced with sudden danger? Imagine you encounter a burglar in your home. What do you do? When you first see them you freeze up and just stare in surprise. Then you have to make a decision. You either run away or attack. Imagine if you changed your response. What if your first response was to attack? This would surprise the buglar and give you the advantage. This scenario is occuring in businesses around the country today. The sudden drop in the economy has caught most by surprise and they are standing around with their mouth agape, not moving, not growing, and not responding in any way. They are hoping it’s all a mirage and simply goes away if they remain still long enough. Other businesses are giving up, running away, and are attempting to minimize the future damage to their profits. However, the courageous few are responding with an attack. They are moving forward and advancing.

There are three possible responses to threats that we can experience; freeze, flight, and fight. Unless we have been trained to react differently, these three responses nearly always occur in this order. We first freeze. We lock-up or “choke.” If you learn your competitor has taken a key customer, won an important contract, or a tax law has changed in a way that doesn’t favor our business or industry – we freeze. We don’t respond at first. This is the response we are seeing in the market right now. With the perception that the economy is down, companies have stopped trying to grow, stopped advancing their agendas. This is a freeze reaction. This response is sometimes appropriate. When danger nears, freezing may prevent you from doing something you’ll regret. Most of the time it only creates a delay that accomplishes nothing.

The second response is that of flight. We try to run away. Again, we see this in the market now. Companies, pull out of markets, lay off people, and hunker down for bad times. Like freezing, fleeing is sometimes the right response. However, when others are leaving it opens the competitive market place for those with the courage to make progres.

The last response is that of fight. This response is active and moves forward to take advantage of the freeze and flight condition of rivals. This is the response we want. While rivals are freezing and fleeing, we are handed an opportunity to advance. When the avoid investing the prices fall. When they avoid hiring or layoff people, we have an opportunity to pick up the best people at lower salaries. When they freeze and stop growing we can grow without competition. When they flee the market we can take their abandoned customers.

Put it to Work; Look at your business practices and determine if you have frozen or are fleeing. Decide if this is an appropriate response. Look at your competitors. Are they frozen or fleeing? What opportunities are they creating for you? Sieze them without delay.

Make small advances everyday during this “down” time. Here are two simple ways to evaluate decisions; (1) go with the decision that offers more options, not fewer, (2) break decisions down into one’s with short term consequences. If you decide wrong, you won’t have to live with the results too long.

They key to success in these times is to keep advancing while your rivals have their heads down and are on the run. When people flee they leave behind their treasure and all you have to do is claim it.