Crushing the Competition

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Using Military Strategies to Outthink, Outmaneuver and Outperform the Competition

By: Omar Johnson

Narrated by: Mysti Jording

Length: 1 hr and 14 mins

Publisher's Summary

Make no mistake about it - business is war. The playing field, no matter what category or niche that your business is in, is crowded and filled with competitors big and small who have the ambition of not only dominating the marketplace and squeezing every dollar out of it, but also to crush you and drive you out of business, rendering you useless to the customers that you serve or wish to serve. As an entrepreneur you must of course avoid this at all costs. But in order to do so you need a blueprint and a framework for fending off your competitors and ultimately crushing them because business, like war, is a kill-or-be-killed endeavor.

You have to be a general on the battlefield no matter how big or small your business is. You can be a simple or complex commander when leading your troops to battle, but one thing you must possess is the wisdom on how to effectively position your business and lead your troops. You have to know when and how to maneuver, when and how to attack, and how to retreat not because of cowardice, but to ultimately gain victory over your competitors. Plain and simple you have to be a master strategist and possess the ability to execute.

For this framework, serial entrepreneur and author Omar Johnson in his audiobook entitled Crushing the Competition: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Using Military Strategies to Outthink, Outmaneuver and Outperform the Competition, details the military strategies of great commanders and master strategists like Sun Tzu, Ghenghis Khan, Hannibal, Attila the Hun, Miyamoto Musashi and many others that you can draw inspiration from and utilize when forming and executing strategies for your particular business. Why do you need this audiobook? Because as Sun Tzu said in the book The Art of War, "The Art of War teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him. Not on the chance of his not attacking, but on the fact that we have made our position unassailable." The bottom line is that your enemies will come, your competition is fierce. They will be prepared. You must be more prepared. Your strategies must be sound, and as Sun Tzu said that's when you make your position unassailable. Crushing the Competition is the ultimate guide for you as an entrepreneur in your quest to make your position in the marketplace unassailable.

©2013 Omar Johnson (P)2013 Omar Johnson

Good ideas poorly narrated

This is a short book with some very solid ideas at the core, but nothing that you have not heard of before if you have read a bit on the topic.

My first problem is the narrator: too much energy, too fast. The text is a lot of ideas thrown at once. The combination makes it difficult to digest for people new to strategy - which I assume is the target audience of this book.

Further, most of the examples used in the book are military. I don't recall any about how to apply it to business. Last, I disagree with some of the POVs in the book, such as the idea that we are all animals and it's all about winning so following rules of war makes no sense. Definitions such as the one for psychological warfare and guerrilla marketing are off. IMO.

If you want a good book on competitive strategy get one of Guy Kawasaki's books on the topic. If the topic of warfare applied to business is interesting, then I would recommend the classic Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout.