Price wars, duplicated capex, and talent bidding can destroy more value than the winner takes. How to recognize a race to the bottom before you are in it.
Negative-Sum Competition: When Fighting Destroys More Than It Captures Read More »
If you’d bring the same thing to the same customers, compete. If each holds a piece the other can’t cheaply build, partner. The asset-map test for rival partnerships.
Complementary vs Substitutive: The Test That Settles It Read More »
In nascent categories the enemy is customer inertia and no-decision. Why two firms educating a market grow it faster than one, and how to compete inside that truth.
When the Market Doesn’t Exist Yet, Your Rival Isn’t the Enemy Read More »
Players, Added value, Rules, Tactics, Scope: the five levers for redesigning a game you are losing, instead of playing it harder.
Change the Game, Don’t Just Play It: The PARTS Framework Read More »
Your power in any deal equals the value that disappears if you leave the table. A first-principles definition of added value, and how to raise yours.
Business is never purely competitive or purely cooperative. Reframing the frenemy from a cynical joke into a deliberate operating posture for East African firms.
A checklist for the compete-or-partner call: five conditions under which cooperating with a rival is the profit-maximizing move, with East African and global cases.
The Five Green Lights for Partnering With a Competitor Read More »
Most firms map customers, suppliers, and competitors, and stay blind to complementors, the players who make your product worth more. The Value Net for East African operators.
The Value Net: Your Competitor Is Only One of Four Players Read More »
Every compete-or-partner decision reduces to one question: are you growing the pie or fighting for a slice? The mental model that prevents most bad strategy.
The Pie Is the Point: Value Creation vs Value Capture Read More »
When does partnering with a competitor beat competing? A first-principles framework with global and East African evidence: cooperate on the floor, compete on the ceiling.