The Strategy Book

Looking over your shoulder

Strategies compete with strategies. Organisations compete with other organisations. You need to be aware of what the competition is doing. You need to know what customers are doing. Paranoid adaptation is part of the strategy game. Look up, down, back and ahead.

Frequency – Regularly.

Key participants – You.

Strategy rating ***

Netflix – the DVD-by-mail entertainment company – has been driven by a passionate desire to try new things. They know that someone somewhere is doing something that will threaten their survival, so they are willing to cannibalise their own business. They were called ‘a worthless piece of crap’ by analysts who thought competitors would catch up. So they moved faster. Netflix used criticism ...