One of the keys to staying ahead in your business is understanding the competition and what steps they will take next.
Key Details
- In Inside the Competitor’s Mindset, John Horn teaches readers how to use proven techniques and strategies to understand the competition and how they will react.
- Understanding the competition’s mindset requires cognitive empathy and a strategic approach to competitive insight.
- When analyzing a competitor’s decisions, business leaders should ask “why” rather than “what happened.”
Why it’s important
Understanding what the competition is doing can be valuable when making business decisions, but understanding why they are doing it can be the difference between failure and success.
Horn walks the reader through his approach to getting into the competitor’s mindset in his book. By adopting this approach, business leaders should be able to predict competitors’ reactions and anticipate when their competitors will make a move.
Data collection, strategy games, mock negotiations, and other tools can help a business understand the competitor’s mindset and prepare to counteract its strategies. Leaders who know how to act and react quickly in a highly competitive market can stand out from the rest.
Horn is a professor of practice in economics at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Before his teaching career, Horn was a senior expert in the Strategy Practice of McKinsey & Company. He still works as a consultant through Gateway Competitive Insights.
Inside the Competitor’s Mindset was published by The MIT Press on April 11, 2023.
