Does Your Strategy Match Your Competitive Environment? - Martin Reeves. By Martin Reeves | 12:00 PM August 28, 2012 How predictable are competitive conditions in your industry? How much power does your company have to shape its underlying competitive environment? These questions are critical to strategists, since clearly the kinds of strategies that work in predictable industries are likely to be worlds apart from those geared to shaping highly volatile environments. This should hardly surprise you. In our recent research, we’ve found that fully three-quarters of the executives we surveyed at 120 companies around the world in 10 major industry sectors were well aware of the need to match their strategies — and the process by which they create them — to the specific conditions of their competitive environment. And yet, our research also found far too many were employing strategies suited only for predictable and immutable industries.
To understand the scope of this problem, take a look at this chart: Our research on this point is unequivocal. Quartz Communications · Competitive Intelligence: 5 things you can learn about your competition through social media. Industry Analysis Is Dead. What's Next? - Rita McGrath. By Rita McGrath | 12:54 PM January 19, 2012 One of the most widely held beliefs in strategy is that variations in performance can often be explained by what industry a company competes in. A lot of our most cherished tools — five-forces analysis, the BCG portfolio matrix, and even SWOT analysis — rest on this assumption.
But evidence is all around us that, although industries matter, they matter in different ways and with different effects than we may have thought. To take one example that crossed my desk recently, consultancy Accenture has developed a point of view on what they call the “Age of Aggregation.” Among the paradoxes they observe is that market segments in many industries are fragmenting, even as global firms require increasingly large markets to drive growth and profitability. But as they also point out, the most important competition for many organizations today comes from firms who aren’t even technically competing in the same business. Global Opportunity Tool brought to you by HSBC | Business without Borders.
Gagein: A New Way of Tracking Corporate Business News. If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories. The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don't want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. GageIn scans millions of local and regional news sources to aggregate hyper-targeted local news about both large and small companies alike.
2 Ways to Spot Industry-Changing Trends - Management Tip of the Day - August 17, 2011.