Research in Motion’s greatest strength was its Blackberry smart phone and the millions of loyal, passionate evangelists it enjoyed. But when RIM focused on its doomed PlayBook tablet for year, it lost sight of this great strength.

In fact, RIM tried to develop a new great strength, and the world is filled with failed and struggling companies that tried to develop new great strengths.

Take Best Buy, which has a great strength that none of its competitors can touch: physical retail stores. Instead of trying to make those stores the best they can possibly be, Best Buy poured all of its resources into its Web site, trying to compete with Amazon at e-commerce. Of course, that’s Amazon’s greatest strength and Amazon exploits it relentlessly. You will not beat Amazon online.

What’s your greatest strength? Are you laser-focused on it? (Or are you watering down your great advantage with new focuses and priorities?)

Are you leveraging it relentlessly?

Because that’s the surest path to success.

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My new book, Evangelist Marketing: What Apple, Amazon, and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn’t) was published in January. It’s 288 pages on topics like this one. 

My Web site details my work.