Counter-Positioning
The Most Dangerous Strategy in Business
In 1983, a man bought a dead Swiss watch brand for sixteen thousand dollars and announced it would never make a quartz watch. Every efficiency improvement his competitors achieved made him more desirable by contrast. Two years later, a bankrupt soda company discovered that recycled beer bottles let it sell twice the product at the same price , and Coca-Cola's most iconic asset became a tiny glass prison. This volume traces the architecture of bets that work precisely because incumbents cannot copy them, from Macedonian kings who exploited democratic slowness to a scientist who spent two decades building a drug her own CEO publicly disavowed , and maps the graveyard of identical bets that destroyed the people who made them.
“These guys can't all be geniuses. It must be the business.”
— Jorge Paulo Lemann
Counter-Positioning
These guys can't all be geniuses. It must be the business.
— Jorge Paulo Lemann
In 1983, a man bought a dead Swiss watch brand for sixteen thousand dollars and announced it would never make a quartz watch. Every efficiency improvement his competitors achieved made him more desirable by contrast. Two years later, a bankrupt soda company discovered that recycled beer bottles let it sell twice the product at the same price , and Coca-Cola's most iconic asset became a tiny glass prison. This volume traces the architecture of bets that work precisely because incumbents cannot copy them, from Macedonian kings who exploited democratic slowness to a scientist who spent two decades building a drug her own CEO publicly disavowed , and maps the graveyard of identical bets that destroyed the people who made them.