As I mentioned in Part I of this series, we tend to think of competitors as other companies in our same market delivering similar products and services. If we expand our thinking, we can see that it has as much to do with things within our company as outside of it and things we can’t readily see as well as things we can.
With so many factors to consider on so many different levels, it can seem like an impossible task to address the many competitive forces a company faces.
Here’s the good news. Every one of the competitive forces at all the levels I’ve written about in this series are within a company’s abilities to address. This includes even the global External Competitive Forces that might seem incredibly daunting and insurmountable at first.
The experiences of many of the athletes at the recent Winter Olympics can serve as an appropriate metaphor for the three levels of competition.
Think of the Personal Competitive Forces as the passion for a sport that an athlete needs to have and the drive it takes to sustain them through mind-numbing repetition and grueling practices, agonizing self-doubts, and repeated failures followed by repeated victories that serve merely as the table stakes to be competitive enough to move beyond the personal level of competition and arrive at the internal level.
The Internal Competitive Forces would have to do with the equipment an athlete uses to compete. It could be something as basic as the skates one wears or the skis they use in their particular sport. Or it could be as complicated as a luge or bobsled in that sport. Internal Competitive Forces would also include the coaches an athlete uses and the training facilities available to them to practice their sport.
It’s when an athlete starts competing with other athletes that they encounter their External Competitive Forces. But keep in mind that this happens early in an athlete’s career, when the stakes of winning or losing are much smaller and when they’re still grappling with the first two levels of competitive forces. This is also where athletes encounter the weather conditions that could impact their performance or the conditions of the course or ice on which they’re competing. And then, of course, there are the judges and the personal perspectives and biases they bring to their judging.
Considering the incredible number of athletes who begin practicing their sport at a very young age, continue with it for hours-on-end, year after year to finally compete with just a couple dozen other athletes at the pinnacle of their own careers, in conditions they have little or no control over, it seems almost miraculous to win a gold medal!
Fortunately for those of us in business, the odds of winning aren’t quite as daunting as it is for an Olympic athlete. We have multiple chances to fail without having it end our career. We can pick ourselves back up and still end up on the winners’ stand. Plus, we’re able to define our own gold medal.
Being aware of the competitive forces we are facing on any of the three levels at any given time, and then mustering the resources to address them, will determine the level of success we achieve with our company—however we define that success.
