Know who you are up against!

Part of understanding where your organization is headed is to identify with whom you are competing and will compete in the future. Competitors are a critical class of external actors. They shape the markets your organization serves. Their actions will affect your and contribute to the threats and opportunities that you face.

Your planning process needs to address your competition. Responding to, anticipating, and even surprising your competition are ripe considerations when you are developing strategies to get you to your goals and vision of great success.

A useful way to consider competitors is the degree to which they affect or can affect your organization, and to look at the degree to which your organization affects or can affect them. Competitors high on either measure, and especially on both measures, are important for both opportunistic and defensive reasons.