The four pillars of competitiveness hiding in plain sight

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January 20, 2026 | 12:00am

When we talk about competitiveness, we often get 30 – sometimes more than 50 conflicting answers giving you a free headache. That’s because everyone has a truckload of ideas, all honking at the same time, each claiming to be the “top priority.” And somewhere in that traffic jam, logic is waving a white flag of surrender.

So instead of juggling 50 or more “strategic imperatives,” let’s limit ourselves to the four pillars of competitiveness: faster, easier, cheaper and better, except that we’ve to prioritize them one by one.

To tickle your management instincts, look at the illustration below. All pillars appear to be equally important. But don’t worry – that’s a natural human mistake. Go ahead. Rearrange them. Because how you rank these four pillars reveals how you really think about winning.

Lock in your vote before proceeding to read the rest of this article. Among the four, which should come first, second, third and last, in that order of priority?

Managers across the globe know a familiar chant: “We need it better, faster and cheaper,” except that they often miss one important thing – which is how to make things easy for the workers, the customers and the general public.

It’s like telling a doctor: “I want to be healthier, stronger and younger by Friday – preferably without exercise.” The ambition is admirable, but the sequence is the problem.

Order of priority

In actual operational life, improvement does not begin by delivering faster or selling your products cheaper. It begins with something far less glamorous but infinitely more powerful – making a task easier, then better, then faster and finally cheaper – in that order of priority.

It came from Shigeo Shingo (1909-1990) who wrote the book ‘Non-Stock Production: The Shingo System of Continuous Improvement (1988).’ Shingo is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern manufacturing and operational excellence.

His work didn’t just improve organizations – it helped redefine how the world thinks about quality, productivity and Kaizen. For lack of space, let me interpret Shingo’s idea:

1. Easier – design work so an average person can win. If a process is complicated, people will abandon it. If a form requires 12 signatures, people will develop Olympic-level skills in avoiding them. Today, it’s one reason why some banks require only one ID to open an account. Making work easy means making it obvious for people to follow. Obvious next steps. Obvious standards. Obvious flow. Easy is what happens when you remove difficulties: extra approvals, redundant reports, unclear criteria and steps that exist mainly because “they have always been there.”

This is classic Kaizen territory – eliminate wastes before you automate.

2. Better – improve all things that have become easy. Once work is easy, your task is to make them better. That’s where quality lives. It’s where variation is reduced, standards are clarified and outcomes become predictable. That’s where learning replaces firefighting. Many managers treat ‘better’ as a slogan instead of a phase. Then they jump straight to speed. The result? They turn a poor process into a very efficient disaster. If you speed up a confusing workflow, you do not get excellence. You get confusion – delivered via express email.

3. Faster – let speed become its natural result. Only after work is easy and better does faster become safe. That’s the only time you can invest on automation, because digital tools can help amplify clarity instead of chaos. Now KPIs start improving without the pressure of the annual performance appraisal. At this stage, speed stops being a management weapon and becomes a natural by-product of flow. Faster no longer comes from working overtime, constant follow-ups and emails marked “URGENT” in increasingly creative fonts. It comes from removing waiting, rework, batching and unnecessary handoffs.

4. Cheaper – let cost reduction show up in the product’s price. When work is easy, better and faster, something else quietly happens. Almost everything becomes cheaper. You don’t need to hire additional workers or require everyone to do overtime. They don’t have to repair defects, or do some corrective actions. Cheaper because wastes lost their hiding places. Defects stopped consuming materials. Delays stopped consuming labor. Complexity stopped consuming management time. Rework stopped destroying morale. Cost reduction arrives without a formal cost-cutting program.

Leadership test

“Easy, better, faster, cheaper – in that order” is not merely a framework for operational excellence. It’s a leadership test. It challenges managers to redesign work processes before they demand excellence from people. Improve before they accelerate. Because when managers skip “easier,” they compensate it with control.

Whenever they skip “better,” they compensate with pressure. Whenever they skip both, they compensate with cost-cutting. Easy respects human limitations. Better respects process science. Faster respects flow. Then “cheaper” becomes the key to competitiveness.

The most dangerous competitor today is not the one with the biggest budget. It is the one whose work is easy. Their people make fewer mistakes. Their improvements travel faster.
Their technology actually works. Their costs decline without announcements.

Therefore, before your next strategy session demands that everything be better, faster and cheaper, ask an uncomfortable question first: “Are they easy to do?”

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity enthusiast. Email [email protected] or DM him on Facebook, LinkedIn, X or via https://reyelbo.com. Anonymity is guaranteed to those who want their work difficult to do.