In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it.

This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, because it’s just going to become a new standard. It doesn’t pay for a credit card company to invest in customer service, the thinking goes, because that won’t pay for itself, it’ll just raise costs for the leader and for all of its competitors. That’s how the race to the bottom begins.

Perhaps it pays to simply focus on being better at making a profit, or being better at getting new customers, or being better at making the stock price go up. These proxies push short-term thinking and aren’t resilient.

What truly changes the game is when an organization decides to commit to being better at being better.

That’s hard to do and difficult to compete against.