Competitors: Outwitting, Outmaneuvering, and Outperforming

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 to: * 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

Table of Contents:
A FRAMEWORK FOR COMPETITOR LEARNING. Outwitting, Outmaneuvering, and Outperforming Competitors. Competitor Learning. Core Concepts. Signals. THE ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL (AND MULTIPLE) COMPETITORS. Marketplace Strategy: Scope and Posture. Marketplace Strategy: Goals. The Activity/Value Chain. Alliances and Special Relationships. Networks. Assumptions. Assets. Capabilities and Competencies. Technology. Organizational Infrastructure. Culture. Projecting the Competitor's Future Marketplace Strategies. AN ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON COMPETITOR LEARNING. Integrating Competitor Analysis and Decision Making. Appendix. Notes. Index.

About the Author :
LIAM FAHEY, PhD, is internationally recognized as a leading consultant in the area of competitor analysis. He is an adjunct professor of strategic management at Babson College and a visiting professor of strategic management at Cranfield School of Management in the U.K. He is also president of the Learning Partnership U.S., an international knowledge cooperative whose members include some of the world's leading business academics, consultants, and practitioners. He is the coauthor or coeditor of six books, including Learning from the Future and The Portable MBA in Strategy, both published by Wiley. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.