Full article at Rethink Your Strategy: An Urgent Memo to the CEO.

Much of the advice is generic, and requires much more work than the brief headlines suggest. It also implies undoing much of the foolish activity that firms engaged in during the boom – by cutting fringe activities, shedding marginal businesses, conserving cash. [Where was the advice on these basic principles over the last 4 years?]

Then, as I’ve argued before, look for M&A and other opportunities to rationalise competition to your own advantage – see more on pushing out rivals from chapter 7 of my book.

Merely seeing the pattern is interesting but so what? This is a fundamental tool for something virtually no companies do well – truly competitive strategy.

The basic principles are simple:

• Trying to do a bit better than everyone, at everything, to get a bit more market share [as most firms do] is hopeless – very costly, everyone can see what you are doing and does the same, and it just doesn’t work.
• Competitors vary in their scale and strength, and therefore in the benefit you would gain if they weren’t around.

… so it is clearly best to pick your 1-2 key victims and focus competitive efforts just on those - for which the ‘power curve’ is the ideal tool. Having picked which wounded wildebeest to take down, some simple principles help identify how to do it.  These are explained in chapter 5 of Strategic Management Dynamics, and you can download the extract that explains how to destroy competitors [the power curve is what you need for Figure 5.27].