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MYTH: TO COME OUT AHEAD, BEWARE THE COMPETITION

Beware the enemy? Concentrate on the 240-pound linebacker blitzing through the line right toward you?  Never! A quarterback has to concentrate on putting the ball into the receiver's hands. If I spent all my time worrying about the defense chasing me around, I would never throw the pass.

In business, the reality is: Beware the customer! He's your toughest critic, whose anger or satisfaction can make or break you. The great Lew Lehr of 3M says that the people you must outdo are your customers: "To persuade effectively, you must have more imagination than your audience."

In football, you learn through films what to expect every Sunday from your adversary - the opposing team's defense. You scout your adversary for speed, strength, endurance and his love of points-at-any-cost - even at the cost of your intact body. But business is an offensive sport, there really is no defense, nobody you can send out to crush your competition for you. So the best thing to do is concentrate on your own offense.

Yet, most businessmen I know think too defensively.  They become preoccupied with their competition.  They're always thinking, What are they doing over there at Company B? Or, What's the guy in the next office doing that I'm not? Is he buddying up to the boss? What has he got planned? Are they trying to steal my pattern?

What does this do? It gives the advantage to the other guy. You start to play his game. You can become so focused on the other guy that you turn paranoid and spend all your time thinking about the competition when you should be thinking about yourself and your own team, about developing that new product, finalizing your new strategies or chasing down accounts - and the other offensive tactics that will help your company grow.

It is a big mistake to spend too much time worrying about them and not enough concentrating on us.

The best businessmen say, "Damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead. We're going to find out what the competition has by discovering who and where our customer is."  They concentrate on the marketplace, on the customer and on their own performance, not on the competition. A man who is one of the greatest quarterbacks business has seen is G.E.'s Jack Welch. His philosophy is: "Don't sit and worry about the risk to you. Go do it. It'll work out. Make it work out."

It's like the strategy that Delta. Air Lines has. After all, they don't fly the competition, they fly customers. Delta chairman David C. Gatrett, Jr., once said, "We have two rules about our passengers. One: The passenger is always right. Two; If you're in doubt, go back and refer to rule number one." Or, follow the lead of Fred Smith, the genius founder of Federal Express. He allows everybody - all his competition - to observe his technology, his operations, his company's culture. While they're concentrating on him, he's walking away with more and more of their customers.

FACT: Ignore the competition; love the customer.

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