p.3 In today's information age, businessmen and businesswomen must increasingly
be able to make sense of their competition, environments, organisations and strategies in order to be successful.
p.3-4 A competitive advantage is the distinct way an organization
is positioned in the market to obtain an edge over its competitors... The process that is primarily associated with
helping an organization to attain competitive advantage is strategic planning, which can be defined as a disciplined and systematic
effort to fulfill specifications of an organization's strategy as well as the assignment of responsibilities for its execution.
p.6 The output of any analysis should be actionable - that is, future-oriented - and
should help decision makers to develop better competitive strategies and tactics.
p.10 good competitive insights require effective analysis.
p.10 Our underlying premise throughout this book is that businesspeople working in any environment
must have a robust and healthy selection of tools and techniques to help them answer important questions about their enterprises'
abilities to compete, not only in the present but also in the future.
p.11 What surprises us, though, about competitive and strategic analysis, is the limited number of tools
and techniques used by most businesspeople and how little genuine insight results from them, when they have scores of techniques
at their disposal!
p.43 focus information gathering on the strategic needs of the decision makers.
p.96 This process requires you to identify the main sources of competitive pressures
p.97 Understanding how an industry will evolve provides important direction for selecting and managing
strategy... Each competitive force should be constantly monitored for its impact on your overall company strategy
and the opportunities it represents for extending competitive advantage. The interactions amongst these forces and trends
must also be kept in consideration.
p.108 The scanning of these issues should focus on detecting if pressure is building, which might
make the issue more important in the future.
