The Competitve Mind: Strategy for Winning in Business

This book is about competition between businesses; it is a guide to principles of competitive business strategy which offers helpful ideas for devising ways to prevail in confrontation with business competitors. Based on the author’s course in strategy which has been enthusiastically received over more than ten years by executives and students, comprising a diverse international audience, the book is a thought-provoking complement to standard textbooks on corporate strategy. Taking a fresh approach, it concentrates on the idea that maintaining a business over a period of time depends to an important degree on executives being able to compete successfully with others operating their businesses in the same commercial arena. Since strategy is a mind game, its principles are revealed wherever humans compete. This book draws, chapter by chapter, on illustrative instances and examples involving vigorous competition between determined rivals in business and beyond. The author argues that the majority of literature on business strategy is not helpful in dealing with questions about competition. Although popularly employing ‘strategy’ in titles, most such published works are not about strategy at all. Most contemporary accounts of strategic thinking concentrate on preserving a business in steady state through thinking about economics, markets and business development, rather than dealing directly with psychological confrontation between business rivals. This book is designed for readers who are students of business strategy, both ambitious professionals and university scholars. It is a source of productive ideas which will help business professionals to develop ways to think about one of the most challenging, yet neglected aspects of business: confronting rivals.