A great deal of bad strategy begins with a comforting number.

Market share is one of the most over-trusted measures in business because it looks like proof of strength while often revealing very little about actual control. It tells you how much of the market you currently touch. It does not tell you who sets the terms, who shapes behaviour, who captures the best economics, who sees demand first, who becomes hard to route around, or who gets stronger when everyone else grows.

That distinction matters more than most leadership teams admit.

A company can have impressive market share and still be structurally weak. It may be large but replaceable. It may serve many customers without controlling any decisive part of the system. It may be visible in the market but absent from the points where pricing power, dependency, switching cost, regulatory comfort, workflow design, or standards actually get determined. In that situation, share creates exposure more than power. The company has more revenue to defend, more cost to carry, and more surface area to lose.

Power comes from something else.

Power comes from control points.

By control points, I mean the parts of a market that others must pass through, design around, conform to, or receive permission from. These are the places where choice narrows, dependence increases, economics concentrate, and leverage becomes durable. Control points are not always the biggest part of the value chain. In many markets they are the smallest visible layer and the most important strategic position.

Market share measures presence, control points determine terms

This is the first distinction serious strategists need to make.

Market share answers the question, how much of the market do we currently serve? Control points answer a much more important question: under what conditions does the market operate, and how much influence do we have over those conditions?

That is a harder question because it forces leaders to examine where actual leverage sits. Does the company control distribution? Does it control customer identity? Does it control switching friction? Does it control access to demand? Does it control compliance interpretation? Does it control the data that trains the system, validates performance, or proves value? Does it control the workflow where alternatives become painful? Does it control the commercial mechanism through which everyone else gets paid?

These are very different positions from simply being widely used.

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The real contest in markets is usually over choke points, not customers

We often describe competition as a fight for customers, but that is usually only the surface-level view. Underneath that visible contest is another one. Companies are competing to own the choke points that shape how customers are acquired, how products are integrated, how risk is managed, how spending is justified, and how alternatives are compared.

This is where strategic thinking gets more interesting.

A control point may sit in onboarding, where identity and trust are established. It may sit in the workflow, where staff do not want to relearn behaviour. It may sit in the reporting layer, where leadership sees value and performance. It may sit in compliance, where approval becomes easier for one route than another. It may sit in the commercial structure, where procurement can buy one thing cleanly but struggles to buy the alternative. It may sit in data custody, where the history required for tuning, insight, and continuity quietly accumulates in one place.

None of these is glamorous in the way market share is glamorous. But they are often far more consequential.

Control points are often hidden inside boring functions

One reason leaders miss control points is that they expect power to sit in obvious places. They look for power in brand visibility, revenue scale, installed base, or category leadership. They do not always notice that durable influence is often buried in functions that appear mundane.

Billing can be a control point. Identity can be a control point. Audit records can be a control point. Procurement approval paths can be a control point. Data lineage can be a control point. Technical certification can be a control point. Distribution rights can be a control point. Default settings can be a control point. Even complaint handling can become a control point if it determines who the institution trusts when something goes wrong.

These positions rarely get celebrated in market narratives because they are not as exciting as product innovation or growth curves. Yet they are often where strategic reality lives.

A company that owns a boring control point can quietly become impossible to displace. Everyone else may appear more dynamic, more loved, or more talked about. But when the market has to choose under pressure, the firm sitting inside the operational necessity tends to win.

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The most valuable control point is often the one that feels legitimate

Not every choke point becomes durable power. Some create resistance, regulatory backlash, or market workarounds. The most defensible control points are usually the ones that feel justified by the system rather than artificially imposed on it.

This matters a great deal.

A control point lasts when participants accept that it serves a real function. It reduces uncertainty. It simplifies coordination. It lowers risk. It improves trust. It makes the system easier to govern. It creates a common language for decision-making. It becomes part of how the market keeps itself stable.

This is why legitimacy matters more than mere friction.

An artificial barrier can generate temporary leverage, but a legitimate control point generates embedded authority. Participants may not love it, but they recognise that the market works better with it than without it. Once that happens, the control point stops feeling like an advantage and starts feeling like infrastructure.

That is when strategy becomes hard to attack.

Strategy is not only about getting chosen, it is about becoming hard to route around

That is the deeper idea underneath this whole argument.

Many strategies are built around being selected again and again. That is fine in open competition, but it is exhausting and fragile if every decision resets the contest from the beginning. Truly strong strategic positions do something else. They reduce the frequency with which choice is genuinely reopened.

This does not always mean lock-in in the crude sense. It can mean being embedded in the reporting layer where value is measured. It can mean being the trusted source of operational truth. It can mean becoming the easiest path through governance. It can mean owning the transition cost. It can mean sitting where multiple parties coordinate. It can mean controlling the evidence required to compare alternatives fairly. It can mean becoming the familiar answer in moments of uncertainty.

These are all forms of route control.

Once a firm occupies that place, competitors may still exist, customers may still express dissatisfaction, and market share may still move at the edges. But the company remains difficult to route around because it has become part of the operating logic of the system itself.

That is much closer to power than popularity ever is.

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