Tough competitors always happy to teach you a lesson. Knowing your competition is just as important as knowing your customer.

Mackay’s Moral: Love your competitors. They are the only ones who make you as good as you can be.

Unless you have a unique product or service, or run a state-owned bakery in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, competition is a fact of life. You must deal with it. The best way is to gather what knowledge you can and then act. Competition can be positive.

You can learn a lot by studying your competition: What are the winners doing to win, and what are the losers doing to lose?

Along with everything else that has changed, the old gladiatorial style of competing has passed. No longer do we just climb into the ring and duke it out. The outcome once depended upon the strength, speed, weaponry and reflexes of the combatants — and whether the Coliseum was muddy or not on the day in question. That was reactive competition, based entirely on waiting for the industry leader to move and then countering.

By Harvey Mackay

Full Story: http://www.cdapress.com/articles/2006/07/09/business/bus02.txt