READOS / Business
Competitive Strategy and Positioning
Choosing where to compete and how to win: industry forces, value position, focus and durable advantage.
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- 01Turning business goals into a workable strategyUse five planning questions to connect your current position, future goals and practical choices, then turn the answers into a plan your small business can act on.
- 02Where strategy is really decided: funding, hiring, escalation and what you tolerateA strategy that never says what to stop has not been written yet. How to turn priorities into real choices, check capacity and attention, and match evidence to how reversible a decision is.
- 03Involving the people who will deliver your strategyBuild a planning process that includes decision-makers and implementers, surfaces practical constraints and turns shared discussion into clear, supported commitments.
- 04SWOT analysis that leads to action: evidence, the TOWS matrix and a worked exampleHow to run a SWOT analysis that produces decisions rather than a list: separate internal and external factors, gather evidence, prioritise, and turn findings into strategies with the TOWS matrix.
- 05Porter's five forces and generic strategies for small businesses: reading your industry and choosing how to competeHow small businesses can use Michael Porter's five forces to understand industry profitability and pressures, then choose cost leadership, differentiation or a focus strategy, and monitor competitors.
- 06Choosing your value position: performance, relationship, emotion or price, and aligning every department behind itHow to decide what your business will be known for: four kinds of customer value, the price–quality map, why positioning needs separate brands, and how each department must change to deliver it.
- 07Competitive strengths or common ones: testing what actually earns a priceReliability and responsiveness keep you in the game but rarely win it. How to test which strengths customers pay for, fund common ones only to par and find the costs that eat profit.
- 08Durable competitive advantage: the idea behind Buffett's best investmentsWhy Warren Buffett looks for businesses whose advantage lasts for decades, the three shapes that advantage usually takes, and what it means for anyone building a business.
- 09Designing a business for durability: a founder's reading of BuffettBuffett reads financial statements to find durable businesses. Read in reverse, the same signals become a design checklist for anyone building a business from scratch.
- 10Focusing business resources without losing flexibilityLearn how a small business can concentrate effort on a valuable customer problem, test uncertain choices and expand carefully without committing every resource.
- 11Pruning what the business offers: which products and services still earn their placeBreadth arrives one sensible yes at a time and leaves only on purpose. How to count what each line really costs in unit cost, customer recall and owner attention, and decide what to keep.
- 12Explore or exploit? The multi-armed bandit problemShould you stick with what works or try something new? The bandit problem formalises this dilemma. How exploration strategies work and how to apply them to marketing, products and suppliers.
- 13From making to orchestrating: what changes when you outsource the repeatable workOutsourcing production can turn a maker into a coordinator of projects and suppliers. How that shifts where margin sits, why learning stops compounding and which capabilities to keep.
- 14Own or rent your route to customers: platform dependence and the assets you must controlDemand that arrives through someone else's platform can be withdrawn without notice. How to measure that dependence, build demand you can reach directly and secure your domains and accounts.
- 15How measures reshape strategy: when goals turn into dates and the horizon shrinksGoals set in growth and margin often reach the workfloor as cost and deadlines, and short review cycles crowd out long-term value. How to keep measures faithful to what the business wants.
- 16When others decide too: game theory for business decisionsYour best choice often depends on what others do. A plain-English guide to dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium, the prisoner's dilemma and how people really reason about each other.
- 17Monitoring competitors online: free and paid tools, what to watch and a monthly routineHow small businesses can track competitors' websites, search rankings, content, advertising, social media and reviews with simple tools, a monthly routine and ethical limits.
These topic-based reading collections are organised alphabetically; chapters may be read in any order.
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