xxiv Essentially, developing a competitive strategy is developing
a broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry
out those goals... Figure I-1 illustrates that competitive strategy is a combination of the ends
(goals) for which the firm is striving and the means (policies) by which it is seeking to get there.
p.3 The essence of formulating competitive strategy is relating a company to its environment.
p.4-5 The goal of competitive strategy for a business unit in an industry is to find a position
in the industry where the company can best defend itself against these competitive forces or can influence them in its favor.
Since the collective strength of the forces may well be painfully apparent to all competitors, the key for developing strategy
is to delve below the surface and analyze the sources of each. Knowledge of these underlying sources of competitive pressure
highlights the critical strengths and weaknesses of the company, animates its positioning in its industry, clarifies the areas
where strategic changes may yield the greatest payoff, and highlights the areas where industry trends promise to hold the
greatest significance as either opportunities or threats... Structural analysis is the fundamental underpinning for formulating
competitive strategy
p.30 Strategy can be viewed as building defenses against the competitive forces or as finding positions
in the industry where the forces are weakest.
p.70 Assuming that competitors will retaliate to moves a firm initiates, its strategic agenda is
selecting the best battleground for fighting it out with its competitors... The ideal is to find a strategy that
competitors are frozen from reacting to given their present circumstances.
p.234 Strategy cannot be formulated without an explicit or implicit forecast of how the structure of the
industry will evolve. Unfortunately, however, the number of variables that enter into such a forecast is usually staggering.
As a result, an approach for reducing the complexity of the forecasting process is highly desirable.
The device of scenarios is a particularly useful tool in emerging industries. Scenarios
are discrete, internally consistent views of how the world will look in the future, which can be selected
to bound the probable range of outcomes that might feasible occur.
