apply-competitive-patience

Apply Competitive Patience

Deliberately abstain from a competition that is exhausting your rivals, pre-position while they deplete each other, and enter after the battle has weakened the winner.

Why This Is Best Practice

Origin: Two stratagems from the Thirty-Six Stratagems address competitive patience from different angles. Stratagem #4 "Wait at ease for the enemy labored" (以逸待勞): preserve your resources while forcing opponents to exhaust theirs — let them come to you on ground you have prepared. Stratagem #9 "Watch the fires from the opposite bank" (隔岸觀火): when rivals are fighting each other, stay on the far bank and observe — intervene only when the fire has done the work for you. Both stratagems share the counter-intuitive insight that inaction at the right moment can be more decisive than action.

Adopted by: Competitive patience is the strategic logic behind the VHS/Betamax outcome (JVC maintained patience on format while Sony committed fully to Betamax; JVC built the OEM coalition that won), the browser wars (Google built web services while Microsoft and Netscape fought; when the dust settled, Google owned the web platform), and Toyota's position during the US auto industry's quality crisis of the 1980s (Toyota pre-positioned in reliability while the Big Three fought over market share). Kim & Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy formalises one dimension of this: compete in uncontested space while rivals fight in the red ocean.

Impact: Direct entry into a market battle between committed rivals is expensive: you bear full market development cost while sharing the win with existing combatants. Competitive patience converts the rivals' investment in fighting each other into your market-entry advantage: the format war establishes the category, the price war educates customers, the standards fight reveals which architecture wins — all at no cost to you.

Why best: The hardest competitive discipline is doing nothing when action is available. Competitive patience requires an explicit decision — not drift, not resource constraints — to abstain from a battle that will exhaust rivals while you prepare. The decision to abstain must be backed by active pre-positioning; otherwise it is not strategy but avoidance.

Sources: Thirty-Six Stratagems #4 and #9 (Sawyer trans. 1994); Kim & Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy (2005); Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma (1997)

Steps

Step 1: Map the competitive battle — who is fighting whom, and what is the cost?

Before abstaining, understand the battle:

Question	What to assess
Who is fighting?	Identify the combatants and their resource commitments
What are they fighting for?	Market share, a customer segment, a technical standard, a distribution channel
Who benefits from the fight?	Customers (lower prices), complementors (open ecosystem), or late entrants (pre-exhausted rivals)
What does the fight cost each combatant?	Capital, talent, margin, management attention, brand equity
Who wins if the fight continues?	Which combatant has the structural advantage in a war of attrition?

Step 2: Assess whether abstention strengthens or weakens your position

Competitive patience is not always correct. Abstain only when:

• The fight is exhausting to both sides, not one-sided (a one-sided fight ends quickly with a strong winner)
• You are not needed to catalyse the fight — rivals will fight regardless of your participation
• Pre-positioning is available to you while the fight continues
• Entry timing can be controlled — you can choose when to enter, not be forced in by market dynamics

Do not abstain when:

• Abstaining cedes irreversible ground (distribution, standards, key accounts) to a single dominant player
• The fight will end quickly with a clear winner who will then be too strong to challenge
• Your absence allows one rival to win without attrition

Step 3: Establish the abstention posture — make it active, not passive

Competitive patience is not inaction. It is active pre-positioning while rivals fight:

• Build capability: Develop product, technology, or service that will be ready when entry timing is right
• Lock up options: Secure distribution relationships, key talent, or key accounts on a non-exclusive basis that preserves your entry option
• Monitor the battle: Track which rival is gaining, what the emerging winner's weaknesses will be post-battle, what the market will look like when the dust settles
• Resist provocation: Rivals in a losing battle will attempt to draw you in — resist offers, partnerships, and competitive attacks designed to enlist your resources in their fight

Step 4: Identify the entry signal — when the fight has done enough work

Define in advance what signal triggers your entry:

• A format standard is established (entry costs drop; no more technology risk)
• One rival is decisively weakened (their key talent is leaving, their financial position is constrained)
• Customer perception has been educated by the rivals' market development investment
• The market size is proven — rivals have done the work of establishing category demand

Do not wait for the winner to be fully recovered. Enter when they are weakened but before they have consolidated.

Step 5: Enter decisively when the signal fires

The window between the fight ending and the winner recovering is short. Enter with full commitment:

• Deploy the capability you built during the abstention period
• Use the relationships you established pre-battle
• Target the customers the rivals exhausted or underserved during their fight
• Move fast to establish irreversible position before the weakened winner can regroup

Rules

• Abstention must be an explicit decision, not drift. "We haven't decided to enter yet" is not competitive patience — it is indecision. Name the battle you are abstaining from, the reason, and the entry signal that will trigger engagement.
• Pre-position actively during abstention. Competitive patience that does not build capability produces no advantage when entry timing arrives.
• Define the entry signal before the battle begins. Without a pre-defined trigger, competitive patience drifts into permanent abstention — missing the entry window as the winner recovers.
• Abstention is not the same as concession. If rivals interpret your abstention as abandonment of the market, correct the perception — silence invites permanent exclusion.
• Never abstain from a battle that will produce a dominant, unchallenged winner. Watch the fires only when the fire will weaken the eventual winner; not when the fire will produce an unassailable champion.

Examples

Streaming vs. DVD format war (Netflix abstention from disc format wars): In the early 2000s, Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD fought an expensive format war. Netflix did not commit to either format; it built streaming infrastructure while the disc war occupied its rivals. By the time Blu-ray won (2008), Netflix had positioned streaming as the successor to physical media entirely — the format war had been irrelevant to Netflix's actual competition. The rivals who fought the format war funded the category development (convincing consumers that high-definition home video was valuable) that Netflix then captured via streaming.

Toyota during the US quality crisis (1970s–80s): While US automakers fought each other for market share through incentives, rebates, and fleet sales — depleting margin and underinvesting in quality — Toyota maintained patience on the US market, pre-positioning by building manufacturing discipline, reliability, and a dealer network. Toyota did not engage in the incentive wars. When US consumer confidence in domestic quality collapsed in the oil shocks and subsequent recession, Toyota's pre-positioned reliability became a decisive advantage that the Big Three, exhausted from their market share fight, could not immediately match.

Google during the browser wars: Netscape and Microsoft fought the browser wars from 1995–2001, with Microsoft ultimately winning through IE bundling. Google abstained from the browser competition entirely during this period, building the search and web services that would make the browser itself less strategically important. When the browser war ended with IE's dominance, Google owned the platform layer above the browser (search, webmail, maps) that made the browser a commodity — regardless of which browser won, Google's services ran on all of them. Google entered the browser market only in 2008 with Chrome, when the strategic rationale shifted from "who controls the browser" to "who controls the browser runtime performance for web applications."

Common Mistakes

Passive drift disguised as patience: "We're watching and waiting" without explicit pre-positioning is avoidance, not strategy. Genuine competitive patience requires active capability-building during the abstention period.

Abstaining from a battle that will produce an unassailable winner: Not all format wars and price wars produce weakened winners. If one combatant has structural advantages that allow them to win at low cost, abstaining produces a dominant unchallenged opponent — worse than entering when their attention was split.

Missing the entry signal: Competitive patience that continues past the optimal entry point produces a recovered opponent who is now stronger than when you could have entered. Define the entry trigger and honour it.

Letting rivals interpret abstention as concession: If rivals announce your abstention as a victory — and you do not correct it — they gain the narrative advantage of incumbency. Abstaining from the battle does not mean ceding the narrative.

Waiting for zero uncertainty: Entry timing will never be perfect. Competitive patience ends when the entry signal fires — not when all uncertainty is resolved. Requiring certainty before entry converts patience into permanent abstention.