Perhaps a testament to the limitations of viewing the world through the lens of Porter's Competitive Strategy? Someone once said they want to invest in a business that can be run by a ham sandwich. But I don't know. The ham sandwich won't kill you, but the rot that can set in around it, a la bureaucracy, complacency and inefficiency, will not do you any good. But it's not the ham sandwiches that one really needs to worry about, its the pro-active but poorly incentivized or inept managements that will kill you. Take Woolies for instance. A once apparently unassailable competitive advantage, a monstrous ROE on its Australian supermarket business, but the bulk of its capital had become tide up in mediocre ROE activities (look at NZ supermarkets, breathtakingly low ROE). But, because the whole had an ROE that still looked good, management didn't mind. No ham sandwich would ever have achieved that.
For me, one ignores culture and character, at ones peril.
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