May 31, 2025

Inside the Competitor's Mindset

How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success

John Horn

Hosted by Alfred Marcus

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Summary

Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023) offers a roadmap to help leaders predict, understand, and react to their competitors’ moves. It is a valuable tool to help companies stay ahead of their competitors when the competition is intensifying. To make the right choice when a competitor is working hard to prevent it is difficult. This book demystifies the process. For organizations developing systematic tools to effectively predict competitor behavior, this book provides a powerful, fact-based approach to building insight into A must-read for anyone seeking to better understand their competitors. This book shares proven methods for thinking like the competition and understand why they act the way they do. The keys are cognitive empathy and an approach that focuses on why competitors behave as they do. The book presents a systematic approach to competitive intelligence that starts with frameworks that get inside a competitor’s mindset, predict their reactions and assess their actions. The book stresses the importance of collecting forward-looking, predictive data; explains how to use war games, Black Hat exercises, mock negotiations, and premortems to build competitive insight; and makes the case for creating a dedicated competitive insight function within the organization. Reading this book will enable you to anticipate how competitors will react to moves you make. It ingeniously applies lessons from archaeologists, paleontologists, NICU nurses, and homicide detectives to better gather and analyze information when it is not possible to ask direct questions;

Alfred Marcus, Edson Spencer Professor of Strategy and Technology University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.

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Alfred Marcus

As the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, I’ve spent my career helping students, scholars, and executives understand how companies succeed, why they fail, and how they can rise again. I’ve authored over 20 books and numerous articles in leading journals. My writings span immigrant entrepreneurship, demography, corporate turnarounds, and sustainability among other topics. My latest book explores how firms like Dell and Best Buy reinvented themselves. It is called Comeback: Can Great Firms Rise Again? It is published by the University of Toronto Press and will be available at the end of March.

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