Strategic Readiness: Developing a Competition Mindset
Build an organization that can take a hit — and hit back.
Strategic Readiness is a five-session, once-a-week course on how power actually works in competitive business. We study how companies apply pressure, seize control after acquisition, weaponize information, assemble market advantage, and survive under new ownership. You’ll leave with a clearer sense of how serious players operate — and how not to get erased.
Who Should Enroll
- Managers and directors who are stepping into higher-stakes responsibility.
- Founders and senior leaders in companies that may be acquired, rolled up, or “professionalized.”
- C-suite trajectory individuals who need to learn the darker side of leadership.
- Investors who want to understand the private-equity/operator playbook.
What You'll Learn
- How aggressive firms actually compete: narrative warfare, lawfare, channel pressure, and preemptive positioning.
- How new ownership seizes control in the first 100 days — including the “demonstration strike,” where leadership publicly breaks something sacred to send a message.
- How intelligence, loyalty, and messaging are managed through a tight inner circle (not the public org chart).
- How roll-ups and integrations are used to manufacture “the category leader” on purpose, fast.
- How to read threat posture and stay standing in someone else’s play.
Course Format
- Five weeks, one live session per week (75 minutes) on Zoom
- Dual-mode participation: join live or engage asynchronously via short lectures, readings, and Canvas discussions — you can mix modes week to week.
- Interactive: Lecture and activities
- Time commitment: ~2–3 hours/week
- Maximum enrollment: 50
Weekly topics
Week 1. Mapping the Competitive Landscape
Who’s actually shaping your market, how they exert pressure (regulators, narrative,
distribution, money, speed), and where you’re exposed. We surface the quiet tools
companies use to weaken rivals before open conflict — leaks, framing, alliance denial
— in the spirit of Sun Tzu’s “win before fighting.”
Week 2. Prepping the Firm
How markets and PE investors see you: as an acquirable asset to be shaped into a platform.
We study operator insertion, first-100-days shock moves, forced focus, cuts, pricing
discipline, and narrative unification — turning a company into something that can
be sold as “the category leader.”
Week 3. Hardball
How firms weaponize law, governance, and regulation without looking dirty. Lawfare
to stall rivals. Regulatory pressure to create doubt. Contract and ownership structures
that lock in customers and starve competitors. Board- and succession-level control
to force alignment while staying technically “above board.”
Week 4. Dirty Tricks
The covert and generally illegal side: induced leaks, IP theft, data scraping, impersonation,
targeted poaching, coordinated smear messaging, morale shock. How rivals quietly make
you radioactive at the worst possible moment — and how to recognize that it’s happening
early.
Week 5. Strategy with Purpose
Any sustainable strategy has to do more than win: it has to help an organization endure,
and align with people’s values and goals. We look at how a competition mindset fits
with legitimacy, loyalty, and mission.
Instructor
Dr. Michael Harvey — professor of leadership and organizational behavior; writer and consultant focused on leadership as agentic inquiry and the practical craft of leading people.