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concept of value chain. Porter suggests that the company identify the key, interrelated (generic) activities of the chain and ensure each is focused on creating value. The generic core activities are inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service. The S&T trees specifically address the ability of these functional areas to enable building, capitalizing on, and sustaining the DCE. Porter argues that since a company’s value chain is linked to the value chains of other companies upstream and downstream from the company in the supply chain, then the company’s competitive advantage needs to depend not only on its value chain, but also on the aligned efforts of this value system. The key is to ensure a win for each link in the chain. This is consistent with the approach of the S&T trees.

The VV S&T trees ensure that the constraint, which is the rate at which the company can grow, is controlled by management. The S&T trees also ensure that the constraint does not become internal (such as within a function) or the market. In other words, the S&T tree ensures that the limit to achieving more of the goal is not the capacity of a department or the amount of demand in the market. Management has the ability to take actions to ensure that a department or the market does not become a constraint. The VV S&T trees include steps for ensuring that the constraint does not become a department or the market. These S&T trees were created with the understanding that the real constraint is management time. Having too many initiatives in the organization that management has to oversee is the opposite of exploiting the constraint. The usage of VV S&T trees in organizations ensures that the only initiatives are ones that will result in a significant impact on achieving the goal.

Since the S&T tree does or can address the links in the supply chain (customers or suppliers), the strategy can ensure that the constraint is not within one of these links. The winwin between the various links ensures that all the links are achieving more. However, it is possible that the constraint of the supply chain can be within one of these links. In that case, the S&T tree needs to address how to ensure that the only constraint within the supply chain becomes the ability of the entire supply chain to grow. The focus is not just on win-win for all, but also on the understanding that unless the end customer has bought the product, no company in the supply chain has really made a sale.11

Hamel and Prahalad (1994) point out that companies need to identify and focus on their area of core competence—that which proves the company’s competitive strength. The criteria for the core competence are that it provides the company access to a wide variety of markets, it is difficult to imitate, and it contributes significantly to the end-product benefits. The S&T trees clearly meet the last two criteria. The usage of the S&T trees also enables meeting the first criteria as well. We have come across companies in which more than one of the generic S&T trees applies. In these cases, we can combine the S&T trees into one that is customized for them to enable achieving a DCE in more than one market and not enabling the company to have more than 40 percent market share in any one market. In any case, we usually do want to ensure that the company is not just in one market long term because the company is subjected to the ups and downs of one market. In some cases, an organization can be ever flourishing without diversification. In most cases, we would recommend that an organization plan to go into more than one market in which its core competence applies in order to reduce the risks to the organization.

Hamel and Prahalad argue that the primary killer of existing core competencies is cost cutting and silos. Neither is a concern when effectively using the S&T trees. The S&T tree does not focus on cost cutting, but rather on increasing T faster than OE increases. The S&T tree also ensures that silos are no longer an issue because the actions of the functions