If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.
Use your development time to brief analysts and industry press. Use these influencers as your eyes and ears to let you know what else is being developed by competitors so that you can be the first to market, and don't make the mistake of launching an also-ran product.
Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we're going to win.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle
When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
There's always competitors out there, one way or another.
I study my competition for at least an hour a day. I get on the internet, look at what they doing, then I look at ways to defeat them.
I was always really smart in school. My whole family is smart. We have 'Jeopardy' challenges and have Scrabble tournaments.
Today, the competition is considerably more intense.
I think what makes 'Jeopardy!' special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning.
Here's a good rule of thumb: don't worry about a competitor at all, until they're actually beating you with a real shipped product.
If you put on your business hat, you can't maintain competitiveness by staying at a competitive disadvantage. I mean, you just can't. The odds are just not in your favor.
As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both business management and industrial economics: What determines corporate performance?
It is unnatural for companies to sit down in front of their competitors and share the information about their vulnerabilities.
If you're in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what's going on around you.
It's the business that you guys are in too. We try to get as much information as we can and make the best decisions that we can for the football team.
Understanding how to compete better has really made a difference.
The team that is going to win is the one that does its homework the best by studying its opponents.
We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.
There are people who pay attention to the weaknesses of their friends; that is to no avail. I have always closely watched and profited from the strengths of my adversaries.
The more you know about your opponents, the more you learn how to beat them. Where the holes open to run through, blocking schemes, even down to player tendencies and what hand they like to carry the ball with.
One of the things we recognized coming out of 2015 is we had to get more and more high-level competition.
If we want to be champions, we have to do our homework on all opponents, regardless of their position in La Liga or the stadium.
The thing I preach constantly is do your research; build your knowledge base. Don't just go into business on a whim or a prayer - and don't think 'I'm an entrepreneur so I have to take risks'. Entrepreneurs don't take risks. They take calculated risks; only the good ones.
He carefully studies the position that he intends to conquer.
