"The winners in business have always played hardball. When companies play hardball it means they use every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors. When they achieve competitive advantage they attract more customers, gain market share, boost profits, reward their employees, and weaken their competitors’ positions. They then reinvest their gains in their businesses to improve product quality, expand their offerings, and improve their processes, to further strengthen their competitive advantage. When they can continue this virtuous cycle of activity for a prolonged period, they can transform their competitive advantage into a position even more powerful and desirable—they can achieve decisive advantage. With that, they put themselves into a far more powerful and influential position than that of just the market leader. They can use their decisive advantage to bring about fundamental change to an entire industry, put their competitors into a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still."