Competition in the business world is getting more challenging or so-called being in a red ocean condition. Companies are expected to formulate sustainable business strategies to win business and have sustainable competitiveness. For this reason, on Saturday, December 3, 2022, the Ubaya Leadership Club held a webinar titled “Dealing with High Competition in Business: How to Create a Competitive Advantage as a Sustainable Business Development Strategy” online using the Zoom application. The webinar was opened with remarks by Dr. Werner R. Murhadi (Head of the Master of Management study program who also acts as an academic responder) in this webinar. The webinar was delivered by a professional speaker in his field: Moehamad Irwan Maulana (Senior Executive Vice President – PT Agro Medika Nusantara, PTPN VIII sub-holding). According to Irwan Maulana, it is necessary to understand what an organization is before discussing business strategy. Management can manage resources by using systems/rules together to achieve goals. Management needs strategies to achieve these goals. Strategy is a way to achieve goals carried out in an integrated manner by utilizing all available resources. Strategies must be integrated and coordinated to exploit core competencies and gain a competitive advantage. A business is said to be sustainable if the company can achieve its goals to increase value in the long term and has consistency in maintaining what has been achieved. Unique capabilities are a unique set of resources that consist of tangible assets, intangible assets, and an organization’s capability to utilize assets. Unique capabilities that create competitive advantage have four basic characteristics: valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute. Sustainable business is critical nowadays due to the rapidly changing external environment, rapidly evolving customer needs, and material risks (energy prices, climate change, cyber security, etc.). Unique capabilities are considered internal factors in the business, and both opportunities and threats are external factors. These two factors can create a strategy that must achieve a competitive advantage for the company to sustain the business. Finally, the webinar, which around 252 participants attended, was closed with the hope that human resources within the organization could develop business strategies that are unique and sustainable in order to compete in a volatile environment.
