Suppose you are running a restaurant in a busy commercial area of the city. Along with twenty other restaurants in the same area, you're offering a menu of sandwiches and burgers with various meat in them, and some vegetarian courses.
How do you compete? Well, you can start running more ads to interrupt people and invade their attention spans. You can try to cut back on costs in order to be able to reduce your prices and offer various deals. You can train your personnel for faster (though not necessarily better) service. All of this is so that what you offer is faster and cheaper and more delicious than that of the other restaurants.
Or you can scrap all the meat stuff and switch to an all-vegetarian/vegan menu. Suddenly you no longer have any competition. All the health and environment-conscious people who care about what they eat come to your restaurant. You can use the money you would otherwise have spent on ads and the time you would have spent on coming up with clever gimmicks on actually making your service and your food better, and create a customer experience worth talking about.
Lessons:
1- Competing is not always the best choice, no matter how much it feels like the right thing to do.
2- Doing one thing really well is easier and more effective than trying to do ten things only moderately well.
Perhaps not the smartest thing to do if there are, say, no vegetarians in the city, but the mindset - the paradigm shift - is worth thinking about.
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