The fives steps to conquer

Bill Gates once said “Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so you are only insulting yourself.” While this strategy might be great for personal growth, it may not be the best for a company’s growth.  In today’s competitive market with disruption being the constant change, sustainability and survival have become difficult. For me five steps stood out from the assigned readings to manage these disruptions:

Step 1 – Identify Competition

The primary step in competition analysis should be to understand the current playing field. As mentioned in Porter’s article on “The Five Competitive Forces”, it is essential to identify not only direct competition but indirect competition as well. For example, Apple Pay direct competitors are PayPal, Samsung Pay, Venmo, etc. However, it is also important to identify their indirect competitors would be a person using cash or credit card to make transactions.

Step 2 – Understand your competitor

After identifying your competitors, it is important to gain information about their strategy, vision, and goals. The information could range from identifying the size of the company, potential markets they may be moving into to analyzing their current product offerings.¹

Step 3 – Identify yourself

Post researching about your competitor it is essential to understand where we stand. Probably doing a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) could be a good approach.

Step 4 – Position yourself

After evaluating yourself along with the competitor. We can make use of this gained knowledge to identify two things –

a)    Our Goal – How we want to position ourselves in the market. The goal could be to have the highest profits, have the highest number of customers, sell the maximum number of products, etc.

b)   Developing a strategy that will give us the “unfair advantage” to attain the goal we have set for our organization

Step 5 – Repeat Step 1 to 4

In today’s agile world with new competition coming in every second. It is essential for us to constantly reevaluate our strategy. While working in an IT company which uses agile methodologies, reiterative planning helped us achieve our product goals faster. I feel the agile methodologies can be applied in developing strategy as well to constantly evaluate and change strategies accordingly.

Just like a game of chess, with every move made, a counter move is played by the opponent. Our organization’s success depends not only on us but also our competition.

References

1.  Retrieved from https://www.michiganstateuniversityonline.com/resources/leadership/ways-to-better-understand-your-competitors/