by David B. Yoffie and Mary Kwak
Harvard Business School Press

By mastering the principles of movement, balance, and leverage, practitioners of judo, a centuries-old martial art, learn to overcome more powerful opponents. These principles can also help companies defeat larger or more established competitors, argue HBS professor David Yoffie and research associate Mary Kwak in Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitors’ Strength to Your Advantage.

“We picked up on this idea while conducting interviews at Netscape in the summer of 1997,” the authors note in the book’s preface. “When we asked Netscape’s head of engineering how he could ever hope to compete successfully with Microsoft, given the dominant position of Windows, he gave a very judo-like answer. ‘You can look at Microsoft’s operating system as an asset, or you can think of Windows as a liability that slows Microsoft down.’ ” The Netscape research was documented in Competing on Internet Time, an earlier book by Yoffie and MIT colleague Michael A. Cusumano, and inspired Yoffie to pursue the concept further.

After tracking references to judo in the management literature and consulting with judo experts in the United States and Japan, Yoffie and Kwak interviewed more than fifty executives at a broad range of firms, including eBay, Frontier Airlines, Charles Schwab, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and Intel. Finding that many companies, both large and small, have successfully employed judo-like techniques, they set out to develop the metaphor into a systematic way of thinking about strategy.

The approach they describe minimizes the importance of brute size and strength by teaching companies how to make the most of their advantages — and transform their opponents’ capabilities into disadvantages. Judo Strategy illustrates this lesson with examples from new- and old-economy firms that have learned to “push when pulled” and leverage their opponents’ assets. The authors discuss in detail how the leaders of three companies — Palm Computing (and later Handspring), RealNetworks, and CNET Networks — have earned their black belts in putting judo strategy to work. They also suggest why this approach can sometimes fail.

Managers reading this book will gain insights that will help them develop their own judo strategies, and sharpen their defenses against judo attacks. “Judo strategy is not the answer for every strategic problem,” write Yoffie and Kwak, but “it can help you win whenever you face intense competition and a strategy of head-on attack is likely to fail.”

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