This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

Competing for market share, dominance or the last pastry pushes us to think urgently about the game that’s in front of us. There are several approaches to consider: Punching down feels ungallant, but it’s actually the most common approach. Using our strengths, we eliminate weaker competition by highlighting the benefits of our dominant offering. IBM kept the computer market to itself for decades. Taylor Swift keeps selling records. The market leader offers a combination of safety, skill, reliability and leverage that makes it easy for them to serve existing systems. Punching up can be the best option for the insurgent newcomer. Going where the dominant player can’t or won’t go turns your smaller size and experience into an asset. Staying in your lane is often the right strategy for a market leader facing an insurgent. In Walmart’s case, management understood that shifting their financial structure, business model and focus to shut out Amazon would require that they walk away from decades of growth in markets where they were already dominant. Cooperation is the most often overlooked option. Alliances, networks and rewiring information flow create new opportunities because value is added, not simply captured. There are actually very few zero-sum games, we simply need to use our imagination. What doesn’t work? Insisting. Trying harder. Being just like the leader, but not them.