The war of business: Coming to grips with the way business is run

Business is a competitive sport, or more appropriately, aggressive warfare, and competition is the language of the game. It is not enough to create products, sell them, and make a profit. The objectives of the players are to topple the market leaders, vie for position, make money from the customer, and win market share. On the other hand, market leaders fight to remain at the top, consolidate their position, expand their customer base, and enlarge their market share at the expense of competitors. In their beds at night, top executives spend sleepless nights tossing ideas in their heads about how to win the business war. Likewise, in the boardroom, behind public view, this is what senior executives and strategies talk about and go to every length to ensure winning against the competition.

If you are already in business without this notion, or if the concept of war does not resonate with you, you may not have understood what you are in business for. In the story of the lion and the gazelle in my last week’s article titled Perform or Perish: Achieving Better Performance Results in Turbulent Times, it was an issue of life or death for both animals. Whether you are a lion or a gazelle, you cannot stand still when you ought to be running.

Come to terms with the reality

By saying that business is a competitive sport, I am trying to be politically modest. In some of the world’s top business schools, teachers teach business students the real meaning of business competition—war—and how to fight and win. One such teacher, Richard D’Aveni, professor of strategic management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, said in an interview with Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer on January 11, 2008:

“My course covers things like military strategy. We cover Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Mao Tse-Tung, and apply them to industries like disposable diapers. It sound ridiculous, right? But disposable diapers are a great case of barriers to entry and the use of concentrated force and circumvention strategies, and it’s a great case of von Clausewitz’s ideas of encirclement. I weave these together with my unique strategy concepts, such as creative disruption of a rival’s center of gravity or its spheres of influence, and with stronghold and price-quality mapping techniques. So the students apply the concepts to business using visionary visuals that map the shape of the battlefield and predict the movement on the field.”[1]

Incredible as that sounds, that is the reality of business warfare. Students learn the art of war and apply it in the real business world. But the concept of business as war transcends the classroom. This is how author Donald Wayne Hendon puts it in his book The Way of the Warrior in Business: Battling for Profits, Power and Domination?and Winning Big:

“Business is not just similar to war — it is war! Executives are always trying to improve their position in the market place. They share this belief: My market share will have to come at another company’s expense. It’s a zero-sum game. A rising tide still lift s all boats, but the tide is no longer rising. Instead, businesses are fighting one another for the right to stay in the lifeboat. More fighting means business has become more warlike.”[2]

Philip Kotler, in the foreword to the above book, wrote:

“Ravi Singh (Achrol) and I wrote an article with this title (Marketing Warfare) in the Winter 1981 issue of Journal of Business Strategy. We discussed and evaluated five attack strategies: frontal attack, flanking attack, encirclement attack, bypass attack, and guerrilla attack. We also evaluated five defensive strategies: position defense, mobile defense, pre-emptive defense, flank positioning defense, and counter-offensive defense.”[3]

Business competition, or warfare, is not a new phenomenon. Since the introduction of the free market system, competition, or warfare, has been how the struggle for market dominance has been described. Today, with more players entering the fray, the running of business has become more warlike than ever before.

Business as war is not limited to one particular industry. In every industry, competitors are at war with each other. This is how Kotler again puts it.

“There are price wars, border clashes, and skirmishes among the major computer manufacturers; an escalating arms race among cigarette manufacturers, market invasion and guerrilla warfare in the coffee market. A company’s advertising is its propaganda arm, its sales reps are its shock troops, and its marketing research is intelligence. There is talk about confrontation, brinksmanship, super-weapons, reprisals, cut-throat competition, and psychological warfare. Companies talk about going to battle, invading markets, and returning fire with fire.”[4]

The battle for first place never stops, and only the best competitors emerge as winners.

Imagine business without competition

Competition is what makes business exciting. We recruit the best brains in the industry to help us win the war. We pool all our resources together to engage in this warfare because we must win, remain in business, and prosper. Unlike civil wars or wars among nations, there is a time to end hostilities and “smoke the peace pipe.” In business, hostility doesn’t stop. There is no call for a truce. As long as there are products and services to sell, customers to win, and markets to capture, there will be wars to wage.

Yours may be a startup, a small and medium enterprise, or an older company struggling to find its feet in the marketplace. While reading this article, you may be thinking you are not cut out for war. If so, then the question for you is: If you are not in business to compete, then why are you there? Many of the nations that went to war did not do so because they wanted to go to war. Circumstances drew them into it. When we enter into business, we must do so with the mindset that we are there to compete because that is how our competitors think. We must brace ourselves for what lies ahead.

In a free market economy, no company has an absolute monopoly over a market. It is an open field where every player has an equal chance to vie for a place. A market leader gets toppled overnight. What will set you apart from the competition will be the size of your dream, the quality of your vision, your commitment to your goals, the quality of your operation, your ability to devise a winning strategy, and your capacity to execute it to the letter. These will only be possible when you have high-caliber human capital, because it is people that make things happen.

The author is a business trainer, speaker, and coach who focuses on performance management.. For further information, contact him at [email protected].

 

REFERENCES

[1] Management-Issues.com. (January 11, 2008). An Interview with Richard D’Aveni. https://www.management-issues.com/interviews/4734/an-interview-with-richard-daveni/

[2] Donald Wayne Hendon, The Way of the Warrior in Business: Battling for Profits, Power and Domination?and Winning Big (West Chester, PA: Maven House Press, 2013), p. 1.

[3] Ibid., p. xv.

[4] Ibid., p. xv.

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