Competitors: Outwitting, Outmaneuvering, and Outperforming

by Liam Fahey

Does your business, like many of today's leading companies, make these dangerous competitive mistakes?

Take actions as if competitors did not exist
* Collect extensive competitor data but fail to convert it into insights about competitors' current and potential actions
* Fail to project competitors' likely strategies and moves
* Ask the wrong questions about the strategies and actions of current and emerging competitors
* Conduct competitor analysis separately from strategic thinking

To prepare your business for market rivalry in the twenty-first century you need an approach to competitor analysis and intelligence that far surpasses the best practices in most organizations today. You need Competitors.

In Competitors, international strategy guru Liam Fahey provides a new integrated, comprehensive method for analyzing the competition. Called competitor learning, the method is the product of Fahey's 15 years of consulting, researching, and teaching competitor analysis in cutting-edge companies in the United States and Europe. It combines a system for identifying critical competitor data with a series of analytical frameworks to help you develop powerful strategic insights.

Competitors shows you how
* Determine exactly what you need to know about competitors
* Describe and analyze competitors' marketplace strategy, alliances and networks, assumptions, assets, capabilities, and culture
* Project competitors' likely strategic moves and outcomes
* Draw critical inferences from limited data about competitors' goals, mindsets, and behaviors
* Use competitor analysis to anticipate changes in customers, channels, suppliers, competitive dynamics, and emerging markets
* Gain valuable insights into how and why your organization might win or lose as it competes against current or potential rivals
* Avoid typical errors associated with traditional competitor analysis

Competitors is an indispensable learning tool for managers who want to get ahead of the competition-both today and for the future. It teaches managers how to know their competition as thoroughly as they know their own organization, and how to use that knowledge to outwit, outmaneuver, and outperform rivals.

Praise for Competitors

"The best hope for a company is to be the first to read this book before its competitors do." -Philip Kotler, Professor of International Marketing, J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University

"Liam Fahey has written the first richly textured, application-friendly and realistic book on what is often misnamed competitive intelligence . . . a masterful achievement by a power in competitive understanding." -Larry Prusak, Managing Principal, IBM Consulting Group and coauthor of Working Knowledge

"Fahey's Competitors is a lively, dynamic, major break from traditional 'static' strategic analyses. He provides a unique, pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach for seeing where competitors are going in the future-and how to preempt, reconceive or reshape the 'competitive domain' faster and better." -James Brian Quinn, author of Intelligent Enterprise and Innovation Explosion

"We have embraced Liam Fahey's competitor learning framework as the guiding methodology for understanding the current and emerging competition. Competitors is required reading for taking competitive analysis to the next level." -Benjamin R. Fisher, Jr., Director, Corporate Marketplace, PPG Industries, Inc.

"If I could have my way, this book would remain within the hands of a select few. . . armed with these tools, companies can be positioned to outwit, outmaneuver, and outperform their competitors." -Faye Brill, Director, Business Intelligence, Meritor Automotive, Inc. and former president, Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

Genres: Business

576 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 1998

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gets a "4" for its coverage and clarity. But if it were to include its score for repetitiveness, it would be lower. Fahey collects all the aspects of business you need to look at and gives heuristics for your research and strategy formation and error-avoidance. But these heuristics are repeated again and again in each context--don't forget that the process is iterative, don't use your own company as the base of your assumptions about competitors, the importance of open-ended inquiry, etc. All useful & true but repetitive. I realize that that could be considered part of the heuristic--Fahey wants to make sure you go through these processes in every phase of a project but I can imagine a much shorter book that could have succeeded with this.

[Turgut · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a while. Even for those who have read dozens of books on business, strategy, and politics (as I've read), there will be a lot of new and useful stuff. No-bullshit book, each chapter and each sentence is filled with meaning. Together with J.Carlos Jarillo's "Strategic Logic", this is the best book on business strategy I've read.