A short spoken segment by James Laughlin arguing that one common cause of business failure is failing to research competitors. He draws an extended analogy to his experience as a world-champion drummer—analyzing competitors’ instruments, technique, structure, and posture—and maps those investigative questions to business topics like pricing, customers, product differences, innovation, marketing, team structure, and customer service.
Another reason why businesses fail is not researching the competition. So many businesses fail, they're willfully blind. They know there's competition out there, but they don't spend time analyzing them. Look, when I go back to my world champion drummer days when I was trying to be the world's best drummer, I was constantly analyzing, critiquing my competition. How are they performing? What instruments do they use? How are they tuning them? What's the structure of their music and the theory of what they're doing? What's the posture? You know, what's the tempo? What's the dynamic Variations? No different in business. Who are your competitors? Where do they live? Who do they serve? What do they charge? What's better about their product than yours? What are they doing to innovate? How are you keeping on top of that? How do they market? What's their team structure like? What's their customer service like? So when you don't research the competition, chances are it's going to compete you and beat you.
