apply-crisis-opportunism

Apply Crisis Opportunism

Pre-position capability before a competitor's crisis hits, then move fast into undefended territory when the crisis diverts their attention and resources.

Why This Is Best Practice

Origin: Stratagem #5 of the Thirty-Six Stratagems: "Loot a burning house" (趁火打劫). When your opponent is fighting a fire inside their own walls, their defenders have moved to fight the fire — the walls themselves are unguarded. The stratagem's logic is not to cause the fire (that is a different stratagem) but to recognise it early, pre-position outside the walls, and move the moment the defenders are occupied elsewhere.

Adopted by: Crisis opportunism is one of the most consistently observed patterns in competitive history. Microsoft signed key software developers during IBM's PC strategy confusion in the early 1980s. Amazon accelerated AWS feature releases during competitors' cloud outages, building customer trust when alternatives were most visible. Enterprise software vendors routinely approach competitor customers at contract renewal — a moment of maximum openness — especially after a product failure, data breach, or executive departure. The pattern is not predatory by default; the crisis reveals which alternatives customers would have chosen anyway.

Impact: A competitor in crisis is not merely distracted — they are resource-constrained. Key people who would have defended key accounts are fighting the crisis. Sales teams are managing existing customers rather than closing new ones. Marketing is in crisis communications mode. The competitive positions they normally defend actively are, temporarily, passively held. Crisis windows are typically 90–180 days before effective triage and reallocation occurs.

Why best: Crisis opportunism is not about causing harm — it is about having built the capability to serve customers or capture positions that the opponent cannot currently defend. The ethical version: provide genuine alternatives that customers need, at a moment when they need them most. The pre-positioning requirement ensures the capability is real, not exploitative.

Sources: Thirty-Six Stratagems #5 (Sawyer trans. 1994); Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive (1997)

Steps

Step 1: Maintain continuous awareness of competitor vulnerability signals

Crisis windows are not predictable, but vulnerability signals are observable:

Vulnerability type	Observable signals
Financial pressure	Missed earnings, credit downgrade, reduced hiring, increased attrition
Leadership change	CEO departure, executive team turnover, board conflict surfacing in press
Product failure	Outage, data breach, quality recall, public customer complaints
Regulatory action	Investigation opened, consent decree, enforcement action announced
Cultural crisis	Glassdoor ratings collapse, #MeToo or misconduct allegations, whistleblower press
Supply chain failure	Delivery failures, customer complaints, public apology for service disruption
M&A integration	Post-acquisition confusion, departing talent from acquired team, product roadmap uncertainty

Monitor these signals for primary competitors on a quarterly cadence. A signal is not a window — it is an indicator that a window may be opening.

Step 2: Pre-position capability before the crisis hits

Crisis windows close fast. The organisations that capture opportunities in competitor crises did not build the capability after the crisis appeared — they had it already. Required pre-positioning:

• Product readiness: An alternative the competitor's customers can switch to without a lengthy evaluation process
• Capacity: Sales, support, and implementation capacity to handle demand surge during a crisis window
• Relationships: Existing contact with the competitor's customers — through a trial, a partnership, a community, or a shared event — so you are not a cold call when the crisis hits
• Migration tooling: Data export, integration, or transition assistance that reduces switching friction

If pre-positioning is absent, the crisis window will close before you can capitalise.

Step 3: Assess which positions are now undefended

When the crisis signal fires, map the competitor's positions and assess which are now:

• Actively defended — still receiving normal attention and resource (do not target these)
• Passively held — maintained but not actively reinforced (possible target with patience)
• Undefended — the crisis has pulled the defenders away (primary target)

Key accounts at renewal, distribution partnerships in negotiation, talent in the market, and developer communities without active engagement are common undefended positions during crisis.

Step 4: Move fast — crisis windows are 90–180 days

Urgency is the operational principle during a crisis window:

• Approach undefended key accounts with a specific proposal, not a general meeting request
• Extend accelerated offers that make the decision easy during the window (extended trial, migration assistance, pricing commitment, SLA upgrade)
• Activate the relationships you pre-positioned to generate inbound from affected customers
• Move hiring conversations with competitor talent from exploratory to offers

Speed is the constraint, not quality of offer. An adequate offer in week 3 of the crisis window outperforms a better offer in week 12, when the competitor has triaged and begun defending.

Step 5: Establish irreversible position before the competitor recovers

The goal is not to exploit the window — it is to establish position that holds after the crisis resolves:

• Lock in multi-year contracts, not short-term trial agreements
• Build integrations and data dependencies that raise switching costs
• Make key hires whose departure sends a signal to the market
• Secure reference accounts whose logos convert future prospects during the competitor's recovery

When the competitor recovers, you want to have won positions they cannot easily reverse.

Rules

• Pre-position first. Crisis opportunism that depends on building capability after the crisis appears will always be too slow. The pre-positioning requirement is not optional.
• Move fast but do not compromise the offer. Exploiting a crisis with an inferior product harms your own brand. The competitive offer must be genuinely better or genuinely sufficient — the crisis is timing, not a substitute for capability.
• Do not signal your competitive interest in the crisis publicly. Public statements about competitor's crisis invite the competitor to rally their customers' loyalty through the threat narrative. Work through direct channels, not press.
• Distinguish crisis opportunism from predatory exploitation. Offering genuine alternatives to customers who need them during a competitor's crisis is legitimate competition. Exaggerating the competitor's crisis, spreading false information, or targeting customers' distress rather than their needs is not.
• Not every competitor crisis is a strategic window. Assess whether the crisis is creating positions you actually want to own at a cost you can sustain. Opportunism without strategic fit creates acquisition costs that do not compound.

Examples

Cloud provider customer acquisition during competitor outages: When a major cloud provider experiences a significant outage (AWS US-East-1 outages, Azure regional failures), competitors with pre-positioned capacity and pre-qualified prospects move quickly. Pre-positioning: existing proof-of-concept relationships with the affected customer's team, migration playbooks ready for common workloads, support team on standby with elevated SLA commitments. When the outage lands, the competitor's account manager is managing crisis communications — not defending the account. The window is 30–90 days: the customer's leadership is evaluating multi-cloud or failover options, procurement is opening alternatives.

Talent acquisition during competitor layoffs: When a well-regarded technology company announces significant layoffs, competitors with pre-positioned hiring pipelines move from exploratory conversations to offers within 48 hours. Pre-positioning: engineering leadership had already met candidates at conferences or through professional networks; referrals from current employees in the departing company; offers ready for fast extension. The window closes when candidates have multiple offers or when the original employer's stabilisation narrative lands. Facebook's talent acquisitions during Google's 2008 stock-price pressure, and Salesforce's acquisition of Siebel talent during Oracle's post-acquisition confusion, are documented examples.

Enterprise software vendor capturing competitor's customer at renewal: A mid-market ERP vendor monitors renewal dates for their competitor's largest customers using publicly available information, customer community signals, and partner relationships. When the competitor announces a product sunset, pricing change, or ownership transition, the vendor's account team — which had maintained a relationship with the customer's VP of Finance through community events — calls the next morning. They have a migration assessment ready, a reference customer in the same vertical, and an implementation partner who can deliver in the customer's timeline. The competitor's account team is managing the crisis communications; the window is the 60 days before the customer makes a final decision.

Common Mistakes

No pre-positioning: Attempting to exploit a competitor's crisis without pre-built relationships, capacity, and product readiness produces only a cold call into a distracted account. The window closes before you can deliver the offer.

Moving too slowly: Crisis windows have a half-life. Day 1 of a competitor's outage is a 10x opportunity; day 30 is a 2x opportunity; day 90 is a 1x opportunity as the crisis normalises. Speed of execution during the window is the primary variable under your control.

Exaggerating or spreading the crisis: Public amplification of a competitor's crisis invites blowback and strengthens the competitor's narrative of being under coordinated attack. Work through direct channels with affected customers, not through press or social media.

Taking positions that don't sustain post-crisis: Winning accounts on crisis-pricing that you cannot maintain at scale, or committing to service levels you cannot staff for, creates a worse outcome than not moving during the crisis. Capture positions that hold.

Confusing crisis opportunism with crisis causation: Creating or amplifying a competitor's crisis is a different stratagem with different ethical implications. Crisis opportunism applies to crises you did not cause and that have independent origins.