Your Competitors Already Know Your Next Move
Real competitive advantage isn't built by being better at the same game. It's built by changing the game before anyone else realizes you've started.
Book Review: The Art of the Advantage by Kaihan Krippendorff
OVERVIEW
Most growth-stage companies compete the same way. They look at what competitors offer, try to do it better or cheaper, and hope the market notices. It feels logical. It rarely works for long. The moment you out-execute a competitor on a strategy they can see, they copy it, fund against it, or undercut you. You win a battle and lose the war.
Kaihan Krippendorff is a strategy consultant and former McKinsey advisor who spent years studying why some companies create durable advantages while others grind through margin wars they can never fully win. He found the answer not in modern business frameworks but in the 36 Stratagems, a collection of ancient Chinese military principles describing how skilled commanders defeated superior forces by moving in ways the enemy couldn't anticipate or counter.
The core argument is simple and uncomfortable. Most companies compete in ways their opponents can see, predict, and neutralize. The companies that win consistently don't play harder. They play differently. They use moves that work precisely because they look like something else, or because they happen in a space no one is watching.
CONCEPTS
The 36 Stratagems and what they actually teach. - The 36 Stratagems are a collection of Chinese military principles over a thousand years old. They describe indirect approaches to conflict, including misdirection, using an opponent's strength against them, and creating advantage before the battle begins. Krippendorff doesn't ask you to memorize them. He uses them as a lens to see patterns in how modern companies gain a durable advantage. The value is in training yourself to spot these moves in your market, and to execute them before competitors recognize what you're doing.
The difference between overt and covert strategies. - Most strategies are overt. You identify a market opportunity, build a capability to serve it, and go compete for it. Overt strategies are visible, which means competitors can prepare for them. Covert strategies work in the gaps. They look like something else until they don't. The company appearing to enter one market is actually positioning to dominate an adjacent one. The company offering a free service is locking in data, relationships, or infrastructure that competitors will spend years trying to replicate.
Winning before the battle starts. - One of Krippendorff's central points is that the best strategic moves happen before direct competition begins. In military terms, winning commanders secured favorable terrain before the enemy arrived. In business, this means locking up distribution channels, talent, supplier relationships, or customer contracts before competitors realize they're important. By the time the competition figures out that the move matters, the position is already held. This is how early-mover advantage actually works. It's not about being first. It's about being first to occupy the ground that matters.
Using constraints as competitive weapons. - Conventional strategy treats constraints as problems to solve. Limited capital, smaller teams, and a narrow product line are things to fix. Krippendorff reframes them. In many of the stratagems, the general with fewer resources wins by using those constraints to force an encounter on favorable terms. A smaller company can move faster, serve a niche more precisely, or take risks a larger competitor can't justify. The constraint is the advantage if you position it correctly.
Moves competitors can't counter without hurting themselves. - The most powerful strategic positions aren't simply hard to copy. They're positions where any response a competitor makes actually benefits you. If a large competitor tries to match your pricing model, it destroys their margins. If they try to enter your niche, it fragments their brand. Krippendorff calls these forcing moves. They work because the opponent faces a lose-lose choice. Getting there requires thinking about your competitor's constraints and incentives, not just your own capabilities.
APPLICATION
Map the terrain before you compete. - Before your next strategic planning session, stop asking where you want to win and start asking what terrain matters in your market. What channels, relationships, talent pools, or customer segments would be hardest for a competitor to occupy once you're there? This isn't about protecting what you have. It's about identifying the ground that will matter over the next 18 to 36 months and moving to occupy it before anyone else pays attention. This kind of pre-competitive positioning rarely shows up on strategic plans and almost always is where durable advantage gets built.
Find the move that puts your competitor in a bad position. - The next time you're developing a competitive response, run a forcing move analysis. For each option you're considering, ask what your main competitors would have to do to neutralize it. If the answer is "not much," the move probably isn't strategic. If the answer involves them cannibalizing their own revenue, alienating their current customer base, or taking on risks their investors would reject, you're onto something. The goal isn't a move that's hard to copy. The goal is a move where copying it creates as many problems for them as it solves.
Reframe your constraints as a starting point. - Sit down with your leadership team and list the three things you most often wish you had more of. Budget, headcount, brand recognition, whatever it is. Then ask a different question for each one. What does this constraint allow you to do that a well-funded competitor can't or won't? Smaller scale enables faster decisions. Fewer products mean deeper expertise. Less to protect means more willingness to experiment. Your constraints define where the conventional rules don't apply to you. That's exactly where your strategy should live.
Look harder for the indirect path. - When you're stuck on a competitive problem, the most common mistake is to keep trying harder at the direct approach. This framework pushes you to ask what the indirect path looks like. If you can't win the customer head-to-head, can you win the channel they buy through? If you can't match a competitor on price, can you redefine what the customer is actually buying? If you can't out-resource them, can you move into a space they're structurally unable to follow you into? The indirect path isn't the backup plan. For most growth-stage companies, it's the only path that leads to a position that compounds.
Build a shared strategic vocabulary on your team. - One of the underrated values of this book is that it gives leadership teams a shared language for talking about competitive moves. When your VP of Sales, your CFO, and your head of product can all describe the same situation using the same concepts, the quality of your strategic conversations changes. Run a working session with your leadership team where you walk through two or three of the stratagems and map them to your current competitive situation. You'll surface opportunities and threats that don't arise in a standard competitive review.
TAKEAWAY
Most growth-stage companies compete in ways that are visible, predictable, and easy to neutralize. They benchmark against competitors, copy what's working, and try to execute a little better. It's a reasonable approach for staying in the game. It's a poor approach for building a position that compounds over time. The Art of the Advantage gives you a different framework, one built on centuries of thinking about how smaller, faster forces beat larger, more powerful ones by moving in ways that couldn't be anticipated or countered in time. The concepts aren't academic. They show up in the strategies of companies you already know and admire. For a CEO running a growth-stage company, the question isn't whether these approaches work. The question is whether you're building your strategy around them before your competitors do.
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