Week 6 Reading Reflection

The biggest surprise from this week’s reading from Harvard Business Review was that “industry structure drives competition and profitability” as opposed to other factors. I never really thought about business and profitability in this way, but seeing it explained thoroughly in the article, it makes sense. It’s something I will now think about when choosing to start a new business.

One thing that was confusing in the article was the author’s stance on positioning and competition. In one part of the article, he seems to imply that having rivals/competitors is healthy for the market and industry, then in another part of the article he praises Paccar for choosing an industry with weak competitive forces and little price-based rivalry. These two points seem to contradict each other, which confused me while reading the article.

One question for the author is, what would be an advantageous industry to enter in today’s market? Another would be, how exactly does one expand the profit pool? Is it specific to each industry or is there a method that applies to all of them?

I guess what I disagree with the author about relates to my earlier point about contradictory statements. He seemed to take both sides throughout much of the article, and to be quite honest I felt like a good amount of the article focused on things that seemed like common sense. While he definitely made some great points, the article could’ve been much shorter and better to read it he had cut out the common sense points.