Learn from the Competition

In a recent interview by Harvard Business Review, Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon, when questioned on his own plans to develop Walmart’s e-commerce model which, by his own admission, was slow in launching, and the challenge they faced in doing so particularly around Amazon’s dominance of this sector, stated that when he first took the job as CEO he gave a copy of a book to all his officers called “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone which is an in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon (and well worth a read). All officers in the business were told to read it and understand it then it was discussed together in meetings for a lengthy period thereafter.

Sometimes there are competitors in the market who do one aspect of the business extremely well. We should all be open to the concept of identifying when this is the case, researching the situation and adopting/evolving the model to suit our business and implementing accordingly and, obviously, there may be a training requirement to do this properly.

Having said that, it's easy to become too absorbed in what the competition are doing and forget your own business model/strategy so some caution is advised.