7 Powers

A short, dense book that argues strategy has exactly one job: finding a route to continuing power. Helmer names seven kinds of power and claims that is the complete list. Most strategy writing is vocabulary; this one is closer to a checklist, which is why I keep rereading it.

Three takeaways

1. Power is two things, and most plans only have one. A power needs a benefit (it improves your cash flow) and a barrier (your competitor cannot copy it, even knowing exactly what you did). Almost every roadmap is a list of benefits with no barriers. The uncomfortable follow-up is that a barrier is rarely something you build on purpose. It is usually a side effect of something you built for another reason, which means you have to notice it before you can defend it.

2. Counter-positioning is the only one you can start with. Scale economies, network effects, switching costs and brand all arrive after you are already winning. Counter-positioning is available on day one: adopt a model the incumbent could copy but rationally won’t, because copying it damages the business they already have. That is a strategy a small team can actually execute, and it explains most of the interesting companies of the last decade better than any amount of talk about moats.

3. Timing is part of the strategy, not a detail of it. Helmer’s point that power is established during a window of flux, and almost never afterwards, is the line I quote most. It reframes “are we too early” from a risk into a requirement. If the market is settled, the barrier is already somebody else’s.

The disagreement

Helmer is dismissive of operational excellence. Doing the work better than everyone else is not a power in his scheme, because effort is copyable, and I think he is right about that in the long run.

Where I part ways: in AI products that long run has not arrived. Right now there is no barrier available in most categories: the models are rented, the techniques are published within weeks, and the interface conventions are converging. Applied strictly, 7 Powers says build nothing and wait for flux, which is useless advice for the eighteen months you actually have to survive. Execution velocity is not a power, but it is the thing that keeps you in the game long enough to be present when a real barrier becomes available. The book has nothing to say about that interval, and the interval is where most of us live.

An earlier take

In 2024 I gave this book a stranger treatment in a Medium article, Balancing the Business Chakras. It maps the seven powers onto the seven chakras, root to crown, through a fictional founder of an AI SaaS company. The metaphor is playful. The idea under it holds up: the powers come in an order. Counter-positioning and cornered resources are what you can lay down first, and network and scale economies get built on top of them. That is the second takeaway above, arrived at from a different direction.