Playing with the Industry Leader's Rules Is Competitive Suicide?" If So, Why?

I agree with this statement. When it comes to trying to break into an industry and have a competitive advantage over the rest, the strategy we have to use has to be distinctive. This means we have to come up with a different approach to capture our customers to make them want to use our product rather than product's from the industry's leaders. The best competitive position is always to have no competition. To achieve that level, organizations should not be following what the leaders are doing instead they should formulate, implement and deploy a distinctive strategy that changes the rules of the business game in their favor. What wins in business is not in trying to out-muscle competitors, but rather to out-think the competitors by brainpower. For example, there are three major international television networks in the world, CBS, NBC, and ABC. In the last thirty years or so, none of them have managed to get a monopoly of the television industry. However, in the last fifteen years, all three were over-taken by CNN. This is because the three networks were trying to gain competitive advantage by using the same strategies. Only CNN has a distinctive strategy. Instead of standard broadcasting, CNN went cable and satellite. Instead of going with variety programming, CNN went with news. Instead of staying domestic, CNN went global. And because of these very different strategies CNN is one of the major leaders in the television network industry, making about US$8 billion a year. Another similar example would be the airline industry. For the last fifteen years or so, CEOs of many major international airlines openly said how difficult it was to make savings in revenues and profits. Except one airline, whose operation has proven profitable since they start business activities in 1973 - Southwest Airlines of the US. This is more because Southwest is not very conventional in their approach or running an Airline business, Southwest Airlines have a distinctive strategy, Some of their more significant strategies would be using a single aircraft instead of multiple aircraft and forgoing having a reservation system like most major airlines. However even though Southwest's Strategy is to be as plain and simple without all the frills other major airlines are offering, they are still the major leaders in the Airline Industry This proves that in business; if you are not the leader, never play the game according to the rules that the leader has set. Otherwise,