Shrewd competition

Still, while taking advantage of a competitor’s missteps seems like an obvious way to boost your revenue, tread carefully.

Before you jump into the breach and gobble up the business from your stumbling competitor, make sure that the challenges that befell it aren’t about to whack you as well.

You need to make sure their problems are not indicative of larger problems in the industry as a whole. A lot of companies think their objective is to kill the competition, that it’s the path to profitability.

That is not the objective. Your objective is to succeed. If we think about our rivals as our enemies and we think it’s OK if they’re suffering, we can help them along with suffering by taking advantage. I think it’s corrosive [to the industry].

It’s also important to know the difference between spotting a problem and creating one for your own benefit. It’s one thing if a business gets themselves into trouble and quite another if you spark them to get into trouble by poaching key talent, infringing on intellectual property, or starting a rumor. That’s on the dark side of that line.