Sublime

Product differentiation is perhaps the most important entry barrier in baby care products, over-the-counter drugs, cosmetics, investment banking, and public accounting.

Do you know your firm’s minimum efficient scale (MES), the business volume that you need to be cost competitive? This is a number that every businessperson ought to be aware of.* If

Forecasting potential competitors is not an easy task, but they can often be identified from the following groups: • firms not in the industry but who could overcome entry barriers particularly cheaply; • firms for whom there is obvious synergy from being in the industry; • firms for whom competing in the industry is an obvious extension of the cor

Apparently, neither Starbucks nor Toyota had sufficient people or processes in place to assess how those incremental changes could individually, or in the aggregate, have a negative impact on their value proposition. As a result, both corporations stumbled badly.

industry structure determines profitability—not, as many people think, whether the industry is high growth or low, high tech or low, regulated or not, manufacturing or service. Structure trumps these other, more intuitive, categories.

Managing, by the former head of ITT, Harold Geneen.

“Who are our competitors?”