Our WarGames solution gives you a kind of “strategy benchmarking,” but takes benchmarking one step further to not only compare yourself to your competition, but also go beyond.

The Problems of Strategy Benchmarking

There are three real problems with benchmarking strategy:

1) Benchmarking is essentially “copying.” You find someone better at something than you, and copy their process as best you can. But copying is not good strategy. The only way to have a sustainable, successful strategy is to do something that no one else is doing – otherwise known as differentiation.

2) Good benchmarking is achieved by actually spending time inside a company – usually a non-competitor outside your industry. But while you may be able to learn tactics from successful companies outside your industry, chances are you won’t find an exact strategy that will work inside your industry. And even if you find a successful company outside your industry similar to your own firm, industry differences can interfere with even the most powerful learning you can get from a rigorous strategy benchmarking exercise.

3) The most useful strategy benchmarking would come from getting inside a competitor’s executive team within your industry, but usually that’s either illegal or impossible. You can try to hire your competitor’s employees or “industry experts” to tell you what their strategy is, but it probably won’t give you the information you really need for strategic benchmarking.

WarGames take Strategy Benchmarking to the Next Level

Our solution is one of the oldest management techniques on the planet, but its one that very few companies use at all, and even fewer use effectively – the ancient art of WarGaming.

Even a simple WarGame can overcome all the problems of benchmarking outlined above – and help you to achieve world-class strategies for your businesses:

1) In a WarGame, you can get as far inside the brains of your competitors are you are likely to ever get (for far less cost and with far fewer legal complications).

2) In a WarGame, you can actually see the folly of “copying” as you come to understand your competitors’ strategies in the dynamic world in which you operate every day. You can tailor your own market and customer positioning so as to always stay as different as possible from the competition.

3) In a WarGame, you can also experiment with the world-class strategies found in other industries to see if lessons might be applicable in your own. WarGames allow you to take the best lessons from industries around the world and adapt them to work in your industry, whatever it may be.

What Our Clients Say

WarGames we’ve conducted have led to some profound conclusions – not unlike the ones you might draw after a great benchmarking exercise. Here’s just a few:

• “Our strategy stinks. It is about two generations old and we survive only because we’re so large. No wonder we keep losing market share.

• “We had no idea that [a foreign competitor] was coming on as quickly as they were. If we hadn’t reacted when we did, we would have been a very small footnote in history.”

• “If we don’t acquire a competitor in the next year, we’ll be acquired – one of our competitors is strategically ‘cornered.’ The only way out for them is to acquire us. They may actually be relieved to hear us make the first move.” (This WarGame resulted in a very friendly take-over and a much more profitable industry for all the players.)

• “With one small move, a competitor could take away a major competitive advantage that we thought was secure in the marketplace. We need to do everything we can to block that move.”

WarGames Documentation

• Read our datasheet on WarGames