Strategy Dynamics Briefing 35: Undermining a competitor

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Appraising competitors often involves assessing their strengths and weaknesses in some way, comparable to parts of the SWOT approach that management might use to assess their own business. But such approaches are qualitative and high-level, and quite inadequate for designing and implementing specific competitive campaigns. A more rigorous approach builds on two principles:

  1. A competitor operating in our own industry will likely have both a similar set of resources and a similar architecture for organizing them to ourselves. Competitors may differ ...
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Industry ‘power curves’ for real competitive strategy

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Now here’s a really useful tool from McKinsey. Using ‘power curves’ to assess industry dynamics shows the value of seeing the size-distribution of competitors in an industry. It shows the tool for banking, chemicals, software and biotech. You can do much, much more with this though.

Merely seeing the pattern is interesting but so what? This is a fundamental tool for something virtually no companies do well – truly competitive strategy.

The basic principles are simple:

  • Trying to do a ...
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