Rigorous specialization allied to making full use of partner capabilities creates ‘productive friction’, an emerging approach to business strategy. Products and practices developed at the ‘edge’, and specifically how a company handles exceptions, is a fertile source of improvement and innovation. Systemic adoption will create value in excess of cost and thus defeat margin pressures. This ‘Red Queen hypothesis’ is an approach to surmounting that primary nemesis of the core competency school of strategy, in which continually improved operations yield no lasting value. The antithesis has been the view that chaotic business environments defeat planning and therefore super operations are the best approach; the authors would seek to organize those line operations at a higher level. A company’s long-term direction should articulate its specialization and how it will collaborate with its ecosystem; operating initiatives should be measured by operating metrics that are leading indicators, not financial metrics that are lagging indicators. The thesis seems to apply to industries with strong reliance on IT. But a foray into public policy implications is unsatisfying and leads to disastrous views of educational policy by touting critical thinking over performance, thus empowering the relativists.