Opposite-the-Incumbent Strategy
Turn a complacent rival's habits into your operating advantages
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 96%
The strategy starts with a behavioural map of the dominant competitors: how they hire, approve ideas, spend during downturns, serve customers, and react to change. Find the habits that once protected them but now create delay, blindness, or neglected groups. Build the challenger around a deliberate opposite. Corcoran describes moving ideas from Tuesday to the street by Wednesday while established firms consulted committees and lawyers, hiring hungry people who lacked status, and generating reports and publicity ideas in a market repeating the same methods. Each difference creates leverage only if it solves a real weakness, so the challenger tests ideas quickly and keeps what earns attention, talent, customers, or speed. The advantage comes from asymmetric behaviour, not opposition for its own sake.
Origin
Extracted from The Diary of a CEO
Core principles
- 01Established competitors can become blind to changing customers
- 02Bureaucratic delay creates room for a faster challenger
- 03Homogeneous hiring can leave overlooked talent available
- 04Frequent low-cost experiments generate learning and attention
How to run it
- 1
Map incumbent habits
Observe the repeated hiring, approval, spending, and customer practices of the established competitors.
Pro tip Look for behaviour that remains unchanged while the market changes around it.
Watch out Do not assume a visible habit is weak until you understand what it protects.
- 2
Locate the exposed edge
Identify where those habits create slow decisions, ignored customers, overlooked talent, or stale communication.
Pro tip Use evidence from customers and workers, not just outsider frustration.
- 3
Choose the useful opposite
Design one contrasting behaviour that directly addresses the exposed weakness.
Pro tip Prefer an operating difference the smaller organization can sustain repeatedly.
Watch out Being reckless is not the same as being fast.
- 4
Test at challenger speed
Launch a bounded version quickly enough to learn before the incumbent's process can respond.
Pro tip Use reports, publicity, offers, or recruiting experiments that are cheap to revise.
Watch out Keep required legal and safety checks even when speed is the advantage.
- 5
Compound the evidence
Retain the differences that attract customers, talent, or attention and discard novelty that produces no result.
Pro tip Turn successful experiments into repeatable systems before adding more.
In the wild
Corcoran says established New York brokerages hired people like themselves, moved ideas through committees and lawyers, and repeated familiar practices. Her firm moved quickly, hired people the prestigious firms overlooked, and continually produced reports and publicity ideas.
→ She attributes part of her firm's rise to speed, ideas, and a workforce hungry to prove itself.
Common mistakes
Copying the market leader
A small entrant that adopts the incumbent's slow process loses the flexibility that could offset its smaller resources.
Confusing novelty with advantage
An unusual idea matters only when it improves attention, learning, recruiting, or customer value.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for entrants facing slow, homogeneous incumbents in a market whose customers or workforce are changing.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the incumbent is already fast and customer-focused or when regulation requires deliberate approval.
From the transcript
“I would think of an idea on a Tuesday and have it in the street by Wednesday”
“nobody was thinking of new ideas in real estate”
From the episode
Barbara Corcoran: Turning $1,000 to $1 Billion!