“The law of successful operations is to avoid the enemy’s strength and strike at his weakness.” –Sun Tzu
Concentration of force is one of the great principals of successful
battle. Alexander of Macedon (a.k.a. Alexander the Great) and Napoleon both employed
it. It’s also very effective in business—and can be savagely effective for “the
little guy” with limited resources. That David fella knew just what to do when Goliath
came along—aim for the weakness. Herb Kelleher did the same thing with Southwest
Airlines.
The key is to look for weakness in your opponent’s strengths
then engineer a relative superiority (e.g. like Keller did). You then apply the
strength against your competitor’s weakness (making sure it’s a TRUE weakness, and
not just clever bait—ouch!). Napoleon was brilliant in his ability to actually create
the weakness in the enemy’s line using skillful maneuvering, and not necessarily
superior firepower (e.g. using cleverness instead of committing capital). Then he
would drive through. It was first employed by Alexander the Great 2,000 years before
who used it to repeatedly defeat the decidedly less clever Persian leader Darius.
We used this around here, of course. When we started out again
after selling JobPlex.com we were just another small recruiting service. But we
studied, then specialized in “high-speed/high-impact search” (e.g. clients could
come to us to quickly marginalize their competition by having us use our competitor
intelligence skills to first identify, and then dutifully extract, valuable talent
from a worrisome competitor). This focus, this concentration of energy, gave us
a tremendous advantage over our entrenched, slow-moving competition. As the market
caught up, we then moved onto more interesting specialties and services.
By thinking like this, smart small-guys like Southwest Airlines
and many others have been happily poking javelins at the rear end of big guys for
thousands of years.
You can too. Ask yourself, what are my competitor’s true weaknesses
and does it make solid sense to attack there? The notion of ‘true weakness’ needs
to be emphasized since really tough, knowledgeable competitors will create lures
and wait for you to fall for them. Don’t do that unless it’s part of a broader,
carefully engineered strategy.
And if you think it’s beginning to feel a bit like a game of
chess, then you’re getting it.
Think about it…
