Quotes About Competition

Since I couldn't be the prettiest girl at the party I could at least make it uncomfortable for the one who was.

Regular exercise, all alone, can be boring. If you just can't schedule it for yourself, organize a little neighborhood club. Get all those pleasingly-plump pals together regularly at a certain hour on certain days of the week—and compete. Competition is often just the stimulus you need.

Growth is another widely embraced goal, along with its sister goal, market share. Like ROS, these fail to account for the capital required to compete in the industry. Too often companies pursue unprofitable growth that never leads to superior return on capital. As Porter notes wryly when he talks to managers, most companies could instantly achieve rapid growth simply by cutting their prices in half.

Just to keep our terminology straight, for Porter strategy always means "competitive strategy" within a business. The business unit, and not the company overall, is the core level of strategy. Corporate strategy refers to the business logic of a multiple-business company.

Only by competing to be unique can an organization achieve sustained, superior performance.

I start with competition in Part 1 for the simple reason that if there were no competition, there would be no need for strategy. Competitive rivalry is a relentless process working against a company's ability to find and maintain an advantage.

Strategy explains how an organization, faced with competition, will achieve superior performance.

The key to competitive success—for businesses and nonprofits alike—lies in an organization's ability to create unique value.

Porter starts with the industry because competing to be unique is a choice made against a specific and relevant set of rivals, and because the structure of the industry determines how the value it creates is shared.

Strategy explains how an organization, faced with competition, will achieve superior performance. The definition is deceptively simple.

a good competitive strategy that will result in sustainably superior performance.

In business, multiple winners can thrive and coexist. Competition focuses more on meeting customer needs than on demolishing rivals. Just look around. Because there are so many needs to serve, there are many ways to win.

Competing to be the best leads inevitably to a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. As offerings converge, gain for one becomes loss for the other. This is the very essence of "zero sum.

This, says Porter, is competitive convergence. Over time, rivals begin to look alike as one difference after another erodes. Customers are left with nothing but price as the basis for their choices. This has happened in airlines, in many categories of consumer electronics, and in personal computers, with the notable exception of Apple, the one major company in that industry that has consistently marched to its own drummer.

Companies only have to be "big enough," which rarely means they have to dominate. Often "big enough" is just 10 percent of the market. Yet companies under the influence of winner-takes-all thinking tend to pursue illusory scale advantages. In doing so, they are likely to damage their own performance by cutting price to gain volume, by overextending themselves to serve all market segments, and by pursuing overpriced mergers and acquisitions.

If rivals all pursue the "one best way" to compete, they will find themselves on a collision course.

The five forces framework explains the industry's average prices and costs, and therefore the average industry profitability you are trying to beat.

For Porter, strategic competition means choosing a path different from that of others. Instead of competing to be the best, companies can—and should—compete to be unique.

Whirlwind's configuration of activities produces a different kind of value with a different cost profile. Looking at competing value chains side by side highlights those differences. If your value chain looks like everyone else's, then you are engaged in competition to be the best.

Strategic competition means choosing a path different from that of others.

Competing to be unique is unlike warfare in that one company's success does not require its rivals to fail. It is unlike competition in sports because every company can chose to invent its own game. A better analogy than war or sports might be the performing arts.

The real point of competition is not to beat your rivals. It's not about winning a sale. The point is to earn profits.

Seeing that gate turnarounds are a significant cost driver, you would then dive a level deeper, to the many specific subactivities involved in gate turnarounds. Here you'd be looking for ways to lower your costs without sacrificing customer value. This is how you drive an even greater wedge between your performance and that of your rivals.

than from the product itself.