Put down the Competitor Analysis and get into a Kayak.

10 years ago I retired.

No, I am not that lucky, I am still working, but I retired from competitive kayaking. At the time of retiring I was the reigning World, European and British Champion in Freestyle Kayaking. I spent a decade on the Great Britain team, I won 7 international medals and was one of the highest sponsored kayakers in the UK. I am not trying to boast, this is relevant...

Throughout my competitive kayaking career I developed different strategies for training and for competition. These strategies have applications in business as well, and in this article I am going to talk about competitors.

Competitor analysis is considered as an important tool when developing a strategy for a business, product or service. However, I am going to question how this impacts performance and whether taking an approach that I learnt kayaking may give better results.

When I attended my first World Championships (2005 in Sydney, Australia) I had no expectations. I was inexperienced and all I could do was try my best. I did not consider competitors at all in any of my preparation or even during the event. I expected to be well and truly thrashed by the more experienced competitors. However, to my surprise I came second - a silver medal!

For the next World Championships (2007 in Ottawa, Canada) I wanted to improve on my previous Silver. So I worked hard on every aspect of my training. I also analysed my competitors; I knew who was good at what, who had weaknesses; I did the full analysis and then I trained to beat them. I put a plan together to match competitors' strong points and be better than them at their weak points. This gave me a very focused training plan which I spent 18 months working on. I thought this was the ideal training strategy, surely I couldn't be beaten, I was good, my Silver medal proved that, and now I knew how to beat the competition. I expected a medal and probably a Gold medal. However, that didn't happen; I was so focused on doing the things my competitors couldn't do that I didn't give a good all-round performance and I came 4th. For the first time in 4 years I didn't get to stand on the podium.

So what next, how do I return to former glory? Well, I ditched the competitor analysis, I found that it gave me a focus but the wrong focus, my internal culture had been to be better than someone else rather than being the best I could be. So I adapted my training plan to be based around improving myself as much as possible, strengthening my weaknesses, perfecting my strengths. I studied the rules and the venue (Thun, Switzerland), I made sure my equipment was perfect, my health and fitness were tuned and I invested a significant amount of time in my mental preparations (an often overlooked element of performance training). When I arrived at the event I had no expectation of how I would fair against the competitors but I felt ready and relaxed, I felt like I did back in 2005 - and I won. I didn't just squeeze past the competition but I beat the 2nd place competitor (Toru Hikariya, Japan) by 40%. I completely dominated the competition from start to finish.

So what does that story mean for business strategy? Is it relevant?

In my experience if you benchmark you competitors and base your strategy around beating them then you probably won't. The world is dynamic, something will go wrong and a competitor will do better than you predicted, so, like me, you will drop down the rankings. Change the philosophy from beating others to perfecting yourself/business then it doesn't matter what your competitors do - you will always be highly competitive and perhaps the leader. You should also remember that your competitor is also benchmarking you, they are predicting your performance. If both you and your competitors simply aim to be better than each other then you will end up being the same. Do something different, aim for a different space and they will be the ones left wondering what happened as they go home without a medal.

When benchmarking a competitor you are effectively marking the bottom of acceptable performance. You obviously aim to be better, but how much better? What is the scale? It is human nature to be lazy, it's efficient to only do the minimum required. So if a benchmark is set then that is what will be achieved, just. If there is no benchmark, if the challenge is more open - where could that lead? In my experience it leads to better places. Of course there needs to be some context, people struggle with a blank sheet of paper, but by benchmarking a competitor you are already setting expectations and therefore possibly limiting the performance of the business. A "Be Our Best" (rather than "Beat the Competition") strategy can lead to higher levels of innovation and step change improvements rather than incremental improvements.

Of course totally ignoring the competition is a little dangerous, for me if I didn't get a medal but did my best then I was still happy. For a business to fail can mean lost jobs, so due diligence is of course required. So don't ignore competitors, be aware of what they are doing but don't plan to beat them, instead be the absolute best you can be...

...and good luck.