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Key Takeaways Stop asking what your competitors are doing. That question locks you into playing their game by their rules. The better question is: What do you believe is true that nobody in your market is acting on yet?
Conservative strategy isn’t actually safe. When you optimize for predictability, you’re betting that your market won’t change. The companies that get blindsided aren’t the bold ones. They’re the ones that refined the same playbook until they lost the ability to pivot.
Your team already has unconventional ideas. They’re just not voicing them because failed experiments carry personal cost. If you want that to change, you have to go first. Talk openly about something you tried that didn’t work, not as a packaged lesson, just plainly.
A few years ago, I was working with a CMO at a mid-sized SaaS company. He was a smart guy, really experienced and had been in the industry for over two decades. But he was stuck. Not because he lacked capability or drive, but because every strategic conversation he had started the same way: “What are our competitors doing?”
That’s a reasonable question. It’s also, I’d argue, the wrong one to lead with.
When your starting point is what everyone else is doing, you’re explicitly agreeing to play in their category, by their rules. You’re studying their moves and trying to execute a slightly better version of a game they already own. You end up fighting for margins in a commoditized space. You’ll probably get decent results. Decent, but not great.
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