How to Drive Your Competition Crazy

Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit

Hyperion, 1995

15 min read

10 take-aways

Audio & text

What's inside?

What’s fair in fighting the competition? Keeping customers happy, one-upping the other guy’s PR, digging out his secrets (while keeping yours), or all of the above?

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Editorial Rating

Qualities

Well Structured
Concrete Examples
Engaging

Recommendation

Guy Kawasaki combines insights from eastern philosophy with practical business advice on how to disrupt the market in favor of your company. Through strategic planning and zest for the game, companies can move in on their competitors' customers, credibility, and profit - and have a lot of fun in the process. This exhilarating book is packed with useful exercises, examples, interviews, and even a sampling of children’s literature. getAbstract recommends it to executives of big and small companies who want to shake up the marketplace, and to career-minded individuals eager to rise in the ranks and make their companies stronger.

Summary

Productive Disruption

“Driving your competition crazy” involves disrupting the existing marketplace. This disruption will not run your competition out of business; instead, executed properly, it will open new opportunities for you while squashing some of your competition’s advantages. Driving your competition crazy is essentially a deliberate process that can yield very tangible results.

A Firm Foundation

When people start talking about creativity and originality, they often stop thinking about the rules – which is fine, to a point. If you want to drive your competition crazy, you will need to foster a healthy sense of the unconventional, but lay a firm foundation first. To achieve this, try the following steps.

One: Find a Powerful Enemy

An enemy can be a positive or a negative force, depending on that enemy’s capabilities. Small or weak enemies will drain your energy instead of energizing you. They won’t force you to make yourself better. Find a fight and an enemy worth fighting.

A customer can only push you so far. The push of competitors has no limits. Competitors will incite your passion and provoke you to create a better product ...

About the Author

Guy Kawasaki, a Macintosh expert, is the author of several successful books about business. He lives in Northern California with his wife and kids.

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S. R. 5 years ago

No insight, same story with customer is king and find needs that customers don’t even know they have. <br>The business graveyard is full of companies solving false needs. <br> <br>Finding one competitor is foolish, one needs to know the entire marketplace. The disrupters and big changes happen at the extremities of the market. Be familiar with Porter five forces model and regularly assess the marketplace and your position there.

Guy Kawasaki