Contrarian view points

Creating strategies is tough, because of this some companies either monitor and measure their competitors (which will ultimately lead them to becoming the same as them - you are what you measure) or they do not define a strategy at all (which means they have an unspoken strategy of what ever worked yesterday).

Sometimes the strategy of a company is simply the mindset of the founder, which if copied by the competition propagates the thinking of one person across an industry.

Taking these factors into consideration, that companies copy each other, and that what they are copying is either the mind of the founder or what ever worked yesterday, being contrarian to this makes sense.

By being contrarian you are effectively saying you want to think differently to the above. You are not saying you want to think differently to logical systems or processes, you are thinking differently to lazy systems and processes.

A critic of strategy must be at heart enough of a non-conformist to raise questions about generally accepted modes of thought and conventional thinking that substitutes for original analysis - Kenneth R Andrews

The quote above captures this fully - analysing something for yourself, rather than accepting “conventional thinking” which as we have discovered can be very sub-optimal.