A recent survey shows increasing number of Chinese young people would like to startup their own companies. Whichever market they choose to enter, they will face tough competition from powerful incumbents. Then the question arises: how do you defeat stronger competitors? Which strategy should you use? The answer lies in a simple but great lesson: successful challengers will use “Judo” strategy. What is judo strategy and how should we learn from it? Recently, Xing Zong, a Chinese graduate student at Duke University and a free-lance columnist of China.com, took an exclusive interview with Prof. David Yoffie from Harvard Business School.About Prof. David YoffieProfessor David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean, Chair, Executive Education at Harvard Business School. A member of the HBS faculty since 1981, Professor Yoffie received his Bachelor's degree summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University and his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, where he was a lecturer for two years, and spent two years as a Visiting Scholar in 1995-6 and 2002-3. Professor Yoffie served as chairman of the HBS Strategy department from 1997-2002, chairman of the Advanced Management Program from 1999-2002, and now chairs Harvard's Young President's Organization program. He currently teaches competitive and corporate strategy in the Advanced Management Program as well as a popular second year MBA course, Strategy & Technology.
Professor Yoffie's research and consulting have focused on competitive strategy, technology, and international competition. Outside of HBS, Professor Yoffie's activities include being on the Board of Directors of Intel Corporation, Charles Schwab Corporation, and Spotfire Corporation. He also serves on the board of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Yoffie has lectured and consulted in more than 30 countries around the world. In addition, from 1997-1999 he was a member of the U.S. Department of Justice's commission on international anti-trust and competition policy. When appointed to Intel's board in 1989, he was the youngest outside director of America's largest 150 industrial corporations. Professor Yoffie currently serves as Intel's Lead Independent Director and chair of its Executive Committee.
Interview
Xing Zong: Prof. Yoffie, your current research focuses on competitive and corporate strategy in technology intensive firms. In my opinion, business is just like war. You have to be good both at strategy and tactics to beat your enemy. First let me ask how you wind up in this research area?Yoffie: Using war as an analogy to understand business strategy has some fairly obvious limitations. The primary one is that in most war analogies, it is a zero-sum game. Many business interactions actually are not zero-sum games. There are opportunities for mutual benefits that companies can potentially take advantage of without necessarily killing each other.
If you look at the literature on strategy, the war analogy has been heavily used, especially insights from Sunzu. That’s when I started to ask whether related metaphors might offer better ways to get insight into other areas of competition. The judo metaphor emerged mainly from research I have done on the competition between Microsoft and Netscape. It also emerged as from the economics literature, where several models were developed under the rubric of ‘judo economics.’
Xing Zong: Let me take a bold guess, you must be a fan of military, especially classic battles where strategies abound. Am I right?Yoffie: Often when we teach about competitor analysis, I frequently used quotes from Sunzu and other to help us highlight the key points.
