How to Win Over Competition

The only right way to win over competition, is to avoid competition altogether. This can be done by providing some unique services that your competitors don't. Then there is no competition and you have monopoly.

This is a great victory because you not just win over your competitors but also over the very idea of competition.

The other way i.e. the wrong way of fighting competition is to do same things that your competitors do, just do them more. The problem is, your competitors will likely respond with same action, evening out efforts of you and them both. Situation therefore become worse for both parties.

An example of this madness is price war in marketing, where two competitors striving for larger market share lock themselves in a race to bottom by reducing prices. In each cycle profit of both companies shrink making it harder for both of them to operate. Both continue this practice in anticipation of the other party failing first giving them monopoly. The problem is, it may happen that the damage is so huge that BOTH parties fail and a third one come and take over. Even if a third one do not come, the two can still sieze to exist.

In addition of damage to the fighting parties, there is a larger damage to the society as whole. Though consumes benefit initially by reduced prices, in long run they suffer as either the product is entirely lost due to failure of both parties or the winner now having monopoly raise price back to previous level and then some.

Another example of this in politics is arms race between two countries. As one country develop a new weapon after expenditure of enormous resources, the other soon develop a similar one of its own again with a huge expenditure of its own. This may continue till both of them die due to lack of reinvestments in productive sectors as an unsustainable portion of GDP is allocated to development and maintainence of weapons.

There are many ways of avoiding competition. One is to move to another market by a company, or move to another field such as arts or architecture by a country. Sometimes arts, architecture etc, i.e. the soft stuff, impress and nuetralize an adversary lot more than weapons technology or even a hot war.

In a forest, different kinds of animals exist, and do not compete with each other. There is a place for all kinds of birds for example because each of them get feeded on atleast slightly different food depending on shape of beak, have different survival tactics etc. While both lions and tigers feed on grass-eating animals, their diet is different. Tigers which cannot defeat lions in physical one-to-one fights have abilities of speed and tree-climbing which lions don't.

Its the same idea that animals and birds in wild follows during drought. When food go scarce they instead of fighting on the same resources, tend to migrate to other land where there is plenty of food.

Its the same idea that when there is clutter of available candidates for jobs in a particular field, a lot of candidates simply abandon the field by learning new skills and moving on to other fields which have capacity to accomodate them.

The natural alternative of diversification is starvation. Since resources are not enough to sustain all of the existing parties, some have to die if they do not move on by diversification.

If you are a small company then you cannot compete with your large competitor company. You can however diversify yourself by operating only in the marginal markets which are too small for your competitor to work in but large enough to sustain you . You can diversify in other ways too, the most obvious is to moving to a different product, but also by providing direct sales, faster customer service etc.

If there is for example a large forest in a country producing high quality wood that another country wants, then one way is to fight over that resource, by invasion. This requires huge expenditure of resources by the invader and if the victory do not come fast then another large amount of resources are spend by the defending country. There is however another way for the first country to get the wood without a fight. Its called trade. Ofcourse the first country have to produce something of value to gain money to buy the wood but still its a net positive scheme.

Trade is the base of peaceful co-existence. It enables parties to share resources with benefit going to not just the trading parties but to all the parties because of increase in efficiency. Each of the two parties produce only what they are good in, resulting more and better, and then through trade getting those things they need and the other party produce and sale.

This is not to say that war and competition do not have its place.  One should go for them only when either one's survival is at stake, or when victory is reasonably expected to be cheap and fast. The latter happens when you have special divine help, enemy is too weak, you have just mastered a new technology and have a window, pillars of enemy are defecting to you, or you have just gained huge alliances etc. Its however useless to compete when enemy is roughly as strong as you.

In the light of above, nazi invasion of soviet union was the right decision as far as military strategy goes. Soviet military has just killed almost all of its officers down to level of major, had suffered huge losses by tiny Finland and is generally in middle of industralization. It was that at operation level that fatal blunders were made by nazis like spreading forces on a wide front, providing inappropriate clothing to soldiers, ignoring lacks of roads and general brutality towards conquered people that the defeat came.