Competitive strategy tips

• Rare is the company that truly understands what its competitors care about most. A company with such insights could reverse engineer the moves of their competitors and predict what they were likely to do.
• If you want to anticipate rather than react to strategic moves, you must analyze a competitor at two levels: organizational and individual.
• At the organizational level, you have to think like the strategist of your competitor by searching for the perfect strategic fit between its endowments and its changing market environment. At the individual level, you have to think like the decision makers of the competitor, identifying who among them makes which decisions and the influences and incentives giuding their choices.
• One of the keys to predicting a competitor's future strategies is to understand how much or how little it resembles your company.
• Companies can determine whether they face symmetric or asymmetric competition by using the resource-based view of strategy: the idea that they should protect, leverage, extend, build, or acquire resources and capabilities that are valuable, rare, and inimitable and that can be successfully exploited. Resources come in three categories: tangible assets, intangible assets, and current market positions. Capabilities come in two categories: the ability both to identify and exploit opportunities better than others do. (Eg of McD Vs Burger King ; Microsoft, Sony Vs. Nintendo Wii )
• The objectives of the person or group with a controlling interest in your competitor probably have a major influence on its strategy.
• The importance of non-owner stakeholders in driving a companies' strategy varies by country of origin too. If you compete with a Chinese co, the Chinese govt is often a critical stakeholder. In Europe, environmental orgs and other non govt stakeholders exert more power over corporate decision making then they do elsewhere.