Infiltrating your competitor’s decision loop

Posted by Jesse Kliza in Business, Leadership, Management

I read a great quote today by Bob Warfield regarding business competition:

“…business competition has a lot in common with an aerial dogfight: the other guys have talent (and often more resources) and the stakes are frighteningly high. If you can “get inside” your opponent’s decision cycle, you are in the driver’s seat. They are responding to your initiatives and this is an advantage that’s hard to overcome. When you are inside the decision loop of a competitor, it’s a huge tactical advantage. Google got inside Facebook’s decision loop with Open Social. Apple got inside the cell phone industry’s decision loop with the iPhone. When you get inside the market’s decision loop, it is an enormous strategic advantage. If you are lucky enough to be right, and lucky enough that a major market heads right to where your fighter plane’s guns are already aimed, you get the big success.”

I never really saw this in Google and Apple’s recent plays, but they have done exactly that. They have infiltrated the competition’s decision loops.

Apple was seeing the market for the iPod being encroached upon by cell phone companies via digital music player enabled phones – along comes the iPhone.

Google saw their position as the gateway to the web so to speak, and their value as the means of connecting people with information being threatened by Facebook – hello OpenSocial.

So what does Google’s Android move do? It infiltrates Apple AND Microsoft’s decision loops.

Whose decision loop can you inject yourself into now, that will put YOU in the driver seat?