Jim Champy on How to Outsmart Your Competition

Running Time: 12 minutes 52 seconds

Canadian Management Centre is pleased to present the American Management Associations strategic planning podcast How to Outsmart Your Competition with special guest Jim Champy.

Jim Champy is chairman of Perot Systems Corporations consulting practice and head of strategy for the company. Champy inspired legions of business leaders with his bestseller Reengineering the Corporation. In his new book Outsmart!, Champy describes nine companies that have achieved breakthrough growth by consistently outsmarting the competition. Champy tells their fascinating success stories, revealing powerful, counterintuitive strategies for finding distinctive market positions and sustainable advantages for growth.

Finding a niche that your competitors arent taking advantage of can be key to double or triple digit growth over a sustained period of time. Although these opportunities arent always seen by the average person, they sometimes are, but people dont take advantage of them because they can be seen as so big and daunting that they are perceived as impossible or far too much work. So, this kind of strategy takes a combination of both seeing an unmet consumer need, but it also takes a lot of persistence and hard work. This is not a business model that is built easily.

Another strategy is to compete by seeing outside the bubble. There are so many companies that are stuck in the assumption of how their industry has to operate; theyre stuck in the bubble of a set of industry rules, and they have a very hard time of thinking outside that bubble.

Additionally, another strategy that can be used is to tap into the success of others. There are a lot of interesting phenomena out there if youre observant and willing to ride on someone elses success. For example, Jibbits were created as an accessory to Crocs and grew to a $10 million a year industry, which although did work off the Croc product, also helped increase Croc sales as well.

Competing by doing everything yourself counters some of the contemporary wisdom about outsourcing and off-shoring, which, although an appropriate method of doing business for many companies, there are some that can benefit by doing everything themselves. This strategy also requires you to have a high-margin product. Customers need to be able to/want to pay to keep everything contained with in one company and not outsourced to others. Although an expensive strategy, if you work on this model, there can be a real benefit to keeping everything contained within.

Companies that Outsmart have relied largely on intuition, whereas those that have been outsmarted have depended greatly on research and analysis. Businesses that outsmart tend to walk in the marketplace and have a sense for consumer needs and they develop these senses and intuition, so that when an opportunity arises, there isnt as much analysis done, they tend to move and make decisions a lot more quickly and thus dont lose opportunities.

Corporate culture can have more of an impact on corporate growth than processes, roles and controls. If youve instilled enough of a culture in your employees (i.e. innovation), than the top-down growth leads to inspiration and excitement from employees, causing growth and ideas to come from all over the company. You want your employees to do the right thing at the moment of truth, not necessarily be bound by strictures of rules and guidelines set in place.