Name: Competition demystified
ISBN: 9781591840572

Competition demystified

Columbia Business School professor Greenwald offers a new theory of competition for strategic planners to apply in the real world. He argues that there is only one essential factor in determining competitive advantages: how easy it is for competitors to enter or expand in a given market. If a company can erect strong barriers to entry--through customer captivity, lower production costs, or economies of scale--it can manage these advantages, anticipate competitors' moves, or achieve stability through bargaining and cooperation. Greenwald draws on game theory to explain what you should do if barriers to entry are strong, weak, or nonexistent. He covers a wide range of examples, from retail to telecommunications to auction houses, and his lessons can be applied whether your business is dominated by a single huge player, a handful of roughly equal players, or no one at all.--From publisher description.

What Hacker News says

johnobrien1010Feb 2018

I'm not sure of any good courses. Getting an MBA is often helpful for getting into PM.

Here is a list of books I'd recommend:

Tuned In Joel on Software Don't Make Me Think The Lean Startup The Mythical Man Month The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO The Design of Everyday Things Escape Velocity Competition Demystified The Art of Agile Development

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dritedSep 2017

Here's some: with why I like them

Thinking, problem solving related:

Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock: accurate forecasting

Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman: how to avoid bias

Misbehaving: like thinking fast and slow but more hilarious

The checklist manifesto by Atul Gawande: the power of simple process

From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin: lots of mental models to add to your latticework

Business management:

The Outsiders by William Thorndike: capital allocation

The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz: some mental models for managers facing the real-life struggles of startups

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake masters: for the chapter on what kinds of business are always going to be tough (i.e. ones in perfectly competitive industries)

Worldview:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined

The making of modern economics by Mark Skousen (audiobook): explains various economic ideas through telling the history of the fathers of those ideas.

Investing:

You can be a stock market genius by Joel Greenblatt: where to look for undervaluation

The Essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence Cunningham: Buffett's thoughts in Buffett's words, neatly categorised by topic

Competition Demystified by Bruce Greenwald: how to identify a high quality business

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spodekApr 2012

"Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists."

A better way to put this is to say that the starting point of competitive strategy is to start with a sustainable competitive advantage. "Competition Demystified" by value investing guru Bruce Greenwald covers this point in its first chapter (available free on Google Books -- http://books.google.com/books?id=NZYuAyW8M-sC&printsec=f... and summarized by me in a series on political strategy, where the concept also applies -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-primer-strategy and with an important diagram here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/the-first-step-in-strategy)

Finding a sustainable competitive advantage doesn't require creativity, so Brooks's essay went astray at that point. But having a sustainable competitive advantage gives you the local monopoly he alludes to that allows you to avoid competing and, in business, charge higher margins without getting stuck competing on price and efficiency.

I highly recommend "Competition Demystified" to understand strategy.

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maxgiraldoAug 2026

My understanding is that collusion among competitors is illegal (although I’m not a lawyer). I was referring instead to the prisoner’s dilemma that Bruce Greenwald discusses in Competition Demystified. In theory, competitors, like prisoners who are pitted against one another to rat on one another, are usually better off cooperating rather than turning against each other.

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