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This note provides a guide for exploring interfirm rivalry through the dyadic lens and for predicting competitive responses using the awareness-motivation-capability perspective, with the goal of expanding strategists' understanding and management of competitive engagements at the most basic level. Competitive dynamics is the analysis of competition at the action and response level to predict how a firm will act or react against opponents. Understanding engagements at this level is essential because this is where firms enact their strategies, test their opponents' mettle and capabilities, defend their reputations, and signal their toughness--that is, where business rivalry occurs. The dyadic or pair-wise approach of competitive dynamics makes possible focused analysis that complements Michael Porter's conventional industry structure and its extension, the strategic groups approach.

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Stan Williams, leading nanotech researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, must decide whether to renew the firm's sponsorship of California NanoSystems Institute, spend the funds on internal R&D, or fund foreign universities. Illustrates the challenge of managing firm-university collaborations and develops implications for national competitiveness.

In early 2003, WestJet's management was reviewing its plans for growth, specifically considering whether WestJet should move its eastern Canada base of operations from Hamilton's Munro Airport to Toronto Pearson Airport. WestJet had grown rapidly since its launch in 1996 and was now the second largest airline in Canada. WestJet had originally focused on western Canada, but had entered eastern Canada in March 2000, with an eastern base of operations in Hamilton, a secondary airport in the greater Toronto area. Pearson was Canada's largest domestic and international airport, the primary commercial airport for the greater Toronto area and a hub of WestJet's largest competitor, Air Canada. Compared with Pearson, Hamilton was less congested and charged much lower fees. WestJet's operations had been closely modeled on Southwest Airlines'. The use of a secondary airport such as Hamilton as a base of operations was consistent with Southwest's low-cost, high-utilization features. With higher costs and longer turnaround times due to congestion, a base at Pearson was arguably not consistent with the Southwest business model; however, it was hard for WestJet to ignore the growth potential.

Examines the growing tensions between strategies of national development and the rules of international business. At issue is how increasing globalization is changing the rules of national development for both developing and developed countries. The comparative focus on aquaculture, and the catfish industry in particular, also offers a window into a growing international industry and its potential as a source of poverty alleviation around the globe. Also discusses the U.S. antidumping policy and its processes of investigation.

Describes the process, components, and detailed action steps involved in using scenario planning in any organization. Provides detailed examples that use the process.

This case serves as part of an introduction to estimating investors' required rates of return. It should follow one or two class sessions covering the techniques for estimating WACC. The numerical calculations required are light, although some of the subtleties about the use of risk-adjusted hurdle rates will require time for the novice student to absorb. The case is about the CFO of a telecommunications company who must respond to a corporate raider claiming that a major business segment of this company should be sold because it is not earning a satisfactory rate of return. The case examines the use of a single hurdle rate to evaluate all segments of the company versus a risk-adjusted hurdle-rate system. The tasks for the student are to resolve the debate, estimate the weighted-average costs of capital (WACC) for two business segments, and respond to the raider.

In March 2005, CEO Michael Eskew has asked the Corporate Strategy Group to recommend changes to the strategic process to ensure it allows United Parcel Service (UPS) to continue to transform itself over the next several years. Describes the evolution of UPS's strategic process, with special attention on the company's use of scenario planning techniques, as well as other critical elements of the process: the development of the company charter, strategic planning, strategic decision making, and strategy implementation. Also discusses the roles of the various players in the process, focusing especially on the CEO and corporate strategy staff.

Illustrates the underlying forces that erode a company's competitive advantage and are instrumental in converting its success into failure. Focuses on Motorola's strategic evolution in China, and shows how, over time, divergences emerged between the company's competence and basis of competition, and between its strategy and action. Provides an opportunity to examine how Motorola should strategically re-position itself in China to attain sustained competitive advantage.

Companies spend enormous amounts of energy and capital creating value for customers, but less regard is given to capturing the value they have created. Segmentation based on buying behavior uncovers a tremendous differential in willingness to pay for subjective product attributes such as convenience, status, and quality. Purchase decisions are made through an assessment of a myriad of factors, balancing perceptions of value components against price in a subtle, complex, and often subconscious decision matrix. Customer-centric pricing requires the simultaneous and continuous assessment of product attributes, customer perceptions, and the circumstances of time and place by listening to customers' actions. It is a means of assuring that companies assess the value they create for customers and extract that value from the marketplace.

Mote Aquaculture Park is raising sturgeon for the production of caviar. With eggs imported from Eastern Europe, the park is engaging in a unique venture, bringing Russian caviar harvesting to the United States. The project manager is faced with evaluating a number of issues such as political-legal forces, local and international economics, production technologies, and socio-cultural forces. Further, industry factors also play a key role. As he considers Mote Aquacultural Park's current situation, he knows that a thorough review of these environmental factors are necessary.

From a single, modest club in 1962, Bally Total Fitness had grown to become-in management's words-the "largest and only nationwide commercial operator of fitness centers" in the United States in 2004. Bally had faced its share of challenges, but the last couple of years had proven particularly difficult. Competition in its markets had intensified, Bally's stock price had collapsed, the company had restated earnings to the chagrin of shareholders, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had begun to investigate Bally's accounting procedures. Under the direction of Paul Toback, CEO since December 2002, Bally had revisited its unique approach to pricing and selling health-club memberships, boosted the accountability of club managers for profitability, launched new efforts to help club members meet weight-loss goals, altered its marketing message, and begun to strengthen its internal control systems. Toback and his team were committed to increasing the number of Bally members and maximizing revenue per member. Would Toback's efforts restore Bally's battered stock price, stave off companies that were rumored to want to buy the company, and enable Bally to remain a major player in the industry?

In 2005, CEO Bruce Rohde has almost completed the integration of ConAgra Foods' collection of 90 independent operating companies into a focused, value-added firm and was beginning to think about his successor. ConAgra had become the second largest food company and No. 1 food service supplier in the United States. Rohde believed that the company, with its solid portfolio of brands and history of leadership in important trends such as healthy foods, was ready to begin its next chapter as one of the great marketing companies, in league with Kraft Food or Coca-Cola. The job of the next CEO would be to unlock the enterprise value of the company in the face of continuing customer consolidation and increasingly diverse consumer requirements.

Chinese companies have recently acquired or attempted to acquire famous firms such as IBM, Unocal, and Maytag in western markets, raising strong interest and sometimes resistance. What are the motivations behind these overseas investments? Will Chinese companies become dominant global players? What types of foreign investments will make sense and what modes of foreign entry should they use? What obstacles will they face?

Provides an overview of the Corporacion de Desarrollo Social del Sector Rural (Codesser), a nonprofit organization that was created in the 1970s to run vocational, agrarian schools in rural areas in Chile. In the years following, Codesser broadened its administrative scope by forming alliances with other nonprofits to run schools with other specializations in high school technical education, specifically industrial and cooking schools. In 2003, Codesser board members were evaluating an offer that would lead to a new business niche for their organization: buying a school (instead of just administering it) and offering elementary and college-track secondary education (instead of technical secondary education). Focuses on this decision and its implications. Requires evaluating mission coherency, organizational competencies, financial viability, and growth opportunities.

What's the number of product or service offerings that would optimize both your revenues and your profits? For most firms, it's considerably lower than the number they offer today. The fact is, companies have strong incentives to be overly innovative in new product development. But continual launches of new products and line extensions add complexity throughout a company's operations, and as the costs of managing that complexity multiply, margins shrink. To maximize profit potential, a company needs to identify its innovation fulcrum--the point at which an additional offering destroys more value than it creates. The usual antidotes to complexity miss their mark because they treat the problem on the factory floor rather than at its source: in the product line. Mark Gottfredson and Keith Aspinall of Bain & Co. present an approach that goes beyond the typical Six Sigma or lean-operations program to root out complexity hidden in the value chain. The first step is to ask, What would our company look like if it made and sold only a single product or service? For Starbucks, it might be a medium-size cup of coffee; for a bank, a simple checking account. Then determine the cost of producing that baseline offering. Next, add variety back into the business system, product by product, and carefully forecast the resulting impact on sales as well as the cost implications across the value chain. When the analysis shows the costs beginning to overwhelm the added revenues, you've found your innovation fulcrum. By deconstructing their companies to a zero-complexity baseline, managers can break through organizational resistance and deeply entrenched ways of thinking to find the right balance between innovation and complexity.

Companies often face new rivals, technologies, regulations, and other environmental changes that seem to come out of left field. How can they see these changes sooner and capitalize on them? Such changes often begin as weak signals on what the authors call the periphery, or the blurry zone at the edge of an organization's vision. As with human peripheral vision, these signals are difficult to see and interpret but can be vital to success or survival. Unfortunately, most companies lack a systematic method for determining where on the periphery they should be looking, how to interpret the weak signals they see, and how to allocate limited scanning resources. This article provides such a method--a question-based framework for helping companies scan the periphery more efficiently and effectively. The framework divides questions into three categories: learning from the past (What have been our past blind spots? What instructive analogies do other industries offer? Who in the industry is skilled at picking up weak signals and acting on them?); evaluating the present (What important signals are we rationalizing away? What are our mavericks, outliers, complainers, and defectors telling us? What are our peripheral customers and competitors really thinking?); and envisioning the future (What future surprises could really hurt or help us? What emerging technologies could change the game? Is there an unthinkable scenario that might disrupt our business?). Answering these questions is a good first step toward anticipating problems or opportunities that may appear on the business horizon. The article concludes with a self-test that companies can use to assess their need and capability for peripheral vision.

To manage the business cycle to gain competitive advantage over rivals, firms must develop a "business cycle orientation." Such an orientation must include five important capabilities: the "business cycle literacy" of the top management team; the skillful deployment of various forecasting tools; an organizational structure that facilitates the timely acquisition, processing, and dissemination of macroeconomic information; application of a set of business cycle-sensitive management principles; and an organizational culture that supports business cycle-sensitive management activities. Successfully managing the business cycle does not necessarily depend on the ability to forecast its movements accurately. Rather, all that is required in many cases is for a firm to strategically or tactically respond more swiftly than its rivals.

Major shifts in the business environment can make whole investment strategies obsolete. To anticipate such shifts, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies uses scenario analysis, a method it pioneered three decades ago. Given that most investments are irreversible, scenario planning can be combined with real options analysis to help identify options in the future; help time the decision to exercise a real option; and provide an important input in the process of evaluating real options.

How Dole beat Chiquita by working around a restrictive EU trade policy instead of struggling against it.