415. Obsess Over Your Market (Or Else)
Great Leaders don't take their eye off the market and the competition.
As a business leader, you can't afford to take your eyes off your market.
No matter how great things are today, trends shift, competitors evolve, and new players emerge. If you're not paying attention, you risk losing ground to hungrier rivals.
Market intelligence is a must-have. Constantly watching for emerging trends and relentlessly studying your competition’s latest news.
Knowing the market helps you identify target audiences and create successful products or services. Keeping an eye on trends and competitors enables you to identify opportunities and threats.
Great leaders fight against complacency and ensure that when the market starts to change, they are already working on a response.
Supporting Insights
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” - Andy Grove from Only the Paranoid Survive
“In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. Often, however, managers define competition too narrowly, as if it occurred only among today’s direct competitors. Yet competition for profits goes beyond established industry rivals to include four other competitive forces as well: customers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitute products.” - Michael E. Porter from The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy
Curiosity doesn't kill the cat; it kills the competition. - Sam Walton from Sam Walton: Made In America
“So often, companies are blindsided by a competitor’s innovation or what turns out to be a missed opportunity. “Why didn’t we see that coming??” The truth is, you had no chance of seeing it because you weren’t looking for it.” - Clayton M. Christensen from Competing Against Luck
“To be strategic, you want to ensure that you are projecting forward in time, anticipating the important trends in your market and what competitors are likely to do. This is especially important in many high-tech markets, which often have a rapid pace of change“ Dan Olsen from The Lean Product Playbook
“The goal of continually studying how you create value is vital for startups because value shifts over time. What your customers may have valued when you launched may have changed. Or since you launched, new competitors may have introduced products or services that have since leapfrogged your original value proposition leaving you in the dust.“ - Andrew Razeghi from Bend the Curve
Keep Learning
The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy by Michael E. Porter
“Awareness of the five forces can help a company understand the structure of its industry and stake out a position that is more profitable and less vulnerable to attack.”
Why Trend Spotting is Crucial Staying Ahead
“ Senior managers need to find more efficient ways of interpreting the world around them and prioritizing the application of resources to remain competitive.”
This is all great stuff but in my opinion, the 'market' is not your competitors but your 'customers' - clearly the market doesn't exist without players in it but for me, the crucial thing for leaders is to understand the relationship between their products/services and their customers. In this way you can predict likely outcomes before a competitor does something.