Market leaders who hire me to attack their business always feel self-confident and prepared for my attack. But after five minutes they panic. Why? They think I should attack them in places where they have good defence, but sharks attack where the chances of an easy meal is best served – where the defence is at its lowest. Most management teams are stuck in their comfort zone. This creates unlimited space for predators to enter new territories and ambush market leaders when and where they least expect an attack.

Over the years I discovered many ways to spot with ease the weaknesses of market leaders. Often people disagreed with me, but after a bite or two, they painfully came to realize and understand their vulnerability. Here are some ways to bite into fleshy market leaders. If it is an IT/Internet company, you can immediately assume that IT/Internet is getting old. Whereas once it was an innovative and a vital business field, today it is no longer that. Instead the IT/Internet sector these days is full of old solutions and bureaucratic organizations. In other words, the organization has grown from innovation stage to a stage where the growth of new fields has been held back by old fields and interests. One example is mobile applications – this would have grown much faster if there where no “old” computer interests to protect. This is also the reason why places such as Africa is faster to adopt mobile Internet (they don’t have any old behaviour to replace – everything is new for them).

Technicians are technically strong in the solutions they build for the online world, but they often have enormous weaknesses in understanding the offline world (so I attack from the perspective of offline). If it’s an offline company, I reverse it and attack from the perspective of online, etc.

A good way to attack both an online and offline company is to move between online and offline – market leaders have enormous weakness here and most of them will not even see the attack before it is too late.

Above is from Sharkonomics attack strategies.