The Competitive Mind

This book is about competition between businesses. Taking a fresh approach, it concentrates on the idea that maintaining a business over a period of time depends to an important degree on being able to compete successfully with others operating their businesses in the same commercial arena.

The majority of literature on business strategy is not helpful in dealing with questions about competition. Although popularly employing 'strategy' in titles, most such published works are not about strategy at all. Most contemporary accounts of strategic thinking concentrate on preserving a business in steady state through thinking about economics, markets and business development, rather than dealing directly with psychological confrontation between business rivals.

Here, guidelines are distilled for strategic thinking. Since strategy is a mind game, its principles are revealed wherever humans compete. This book draws, chapter by chapter, on illustrative instances and examples involving vigorous competition between determined rivals in business and beyond. It offers helpful ideas for devising ways to prevail in confrontation with business rivals.

Target Market:

This book is designed for readers who are students of business strategy, both ambitious professionals and university scholars. It is a source of productive ideas which will help business professionals to develop ways to think about one of the most challenging, yet neglected aspects of business: confronting rivals. The book provides a valuable and thought provoking complement to standard textbooks on corporate strategy. This evolving manuscript has been enthusiastically received over the past ten years by undergraduate and executive postgraduate students, comprising a diverse international audience.

Competing Books:

The proposed book stands apart from competing works by its concentration squarely on competition. Uniquely, it advocates Principles as systematic guidelines for strategic thinking in commerce. Unlike other works it distils insight from a critical evaluation of diverse sources, including both contemporary and classic contributors. The resulting combination of Principles is distinguished by the fact that it includes reference to such ideas as initiative, time, deception and morality; concepts rarely discussed in the contemporary literature on business strategy.