Should Competitors Influence Your Strategic Planning Process?

We analyzed 20,582 strategic plans. Competitor-focused strategies had the lowest completion rate of any orientation. Here's what that means for how you build your plan.

By Dylan Miyake, Co-Founder of ClearPoint Strategy

If you've ever sat through a strategic planning session, you've heard some version of this: "Before we set our goals, we need to understand what our competitors are doing." The SWOT analysis comes out. Someone presents a competitive landscape slide. The team spends an hour debating a rival's latest move. And then — energized by competitive anxiety — the group writes a strategic plan designed at least partially in reaction to what someone else is doing.

It feels rigorous. It feels strategic. Michael Porter built an entire framework around it. Every MBA program teaches it.

And our data suggests it might be making your strategic plan worse.

When we analyzed 31.2 million rows of behavioral data from 20,582 strategic plans across 12 industries, we found something that surprised us: the degree to which an organization focuses on competitors in its strategic planning has essentially zero positive correlation with its ability to execute. In fact, the most competitively-oriented objectives in our dataset had the lowest completion rates of any strategic orientation.

This isn't an argument against knowing your market. It's an argument against letting your market dictate your plan.

Only 1.28% of Strategic Objectives Mention Competitors

Let's start with what organizations actually do — as opposed to what strategic planning textbooks say they should do.

We analyzed the text of all 60,444 objectives in our dataset, categorizing them by strategic orientation:

Out of 60,444 strategic objectives across 20,582 plans, only 775 — about 1.3% — use language related to competitive positioning, market share, rivals, or competitive benchmarking.

That's not what you'd expect given how much airtime competitive analysis gets in planning sessions. The vast majority of organizations, once they sit down to write actual goals, focus on internal operations, stakeholder outcomes, and financial performance. The competitive landscape that dominated the PowerPoint presentation quietly disappears from the plan itself.

This could mean two things. Either organizations are doing all their competitive thinking upfront and then translating it into internally-focused goals (the charitable interpretation), or competitive analysis is strategic theater that feels productive during the planning process but doesn't actually shape the plan (the less charitable interpretation).

The data leans toward the second interpretation.

Competitor-Focused Objectives Have the Lowest Completion Rate

Here's where it gets interesting. We looked at initiative completion rates based on the strategic orientation of the objectives those initiatives roll up to:

Initiatives linked to competitively-oriented objectives complete at 7.96% — the lowest rate of any orientation. Financial objectives drive the highest completion at 11.1%. Internal and stakeholder objectives fall in the middle.

The gap between financially-oriented and competitively-oriented initiatives is 39%. That's not noise. That's a meaningful difference in execution outcomes — and it runs exactly opposite to what competitive strategy theory would predict.

Why would this be the case? I have a theory, and Porter himself provides the framework for understanding it.

Porter's Paradox: The Man Who Invented Competitive Strategy Warned Against It

Michael Porter's 1980 book Competitive Strategy is probably the most influential business strategy text ever written. His Five Forces framework — threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitutes, competitive rivalry — became the standard lens for strategic analysis.

But here's the part most people skip. In his 1996 Harvard Business Review article "What Is Strategy?", Porter made an argument that essentially contradicts how most organizations use his earlier work. He drew a sharp distinction between operational effectiveness (doing the same things your competitors do, but better) and strategic positioning (choosing to do different things, or the same things in different ways).

His conclusion was blunt: "The more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike." Organizations that build their strategies in reaction to competitors end up in a race toward competitive convergence — where everyone offers the same features, targets the same customers, and competes on the same dimensions. The result isn't differentiation. It's commoditization.

Our data shows this playing out at the execution level. When organizations set objectives framed around competitive positioning, those objectives tend to be vague ("become the market leader in X"), reactive ("respond to competitor Y's entry into our market"), and difficult to translate into concrete initiatives with measurable milestones. They're strategic statements, not strategic plans. And statements without structure don't get executed.

Compare that to financial objectives ("reduce operating costs by 12%") or operational objectives ("implement a new customer onboarding process by Q3"). These are specific enough to assign, measure, and complete. They don't require you to predict what a competitor will do next. They're entirely within your control.

The Industries That Ignore Competitors Execute Best

If competitive focus drove execution, you'd expect the most competitive industries — the ones with intense rivalry, low switching costs, and constant market disruption — to outperform regulated monopolies and government agencies. After all, competitive pressure should sharpen focus and drive urgency.

Here's what the data actually shows:

Competitive industries do complete at a modestly higher rate (17.2%) than regulated ones (15.1%). But that 2-point gap is surprisingly small given the theoretical advantages competitive pressure is supposed to provide. And when you look at the spread within each sector, the picture gets more complicated:

Competitive sector spread: Technology (23.9%) to Manufacturing (14.3%) = 9.6 percentage points

Regulated sector spread: Energy & Utilities (18.7%) to Government Agency (10.8%) = 7.9 percentage points

The competitive sector has more variance, not less. If competitive pressure were a reliable driver of execution discipline, you'd expect it to lift all boats — a rising tide of accountability driven by market forces. Instead, the competitive sector produces both the highest performer (Technology at 23.9%) and industries that underperform relative to their regulated counterparts (Manufacturing at 14.3% trails Energy & Utilities at 18.7%).

The lesson: competitive pressure is neither necessary nor sufficient for strategic execution. Some competitive industries execute well. Some don't. Some regulated industries execute well. Some don't. What actually matters is something else entirely.

What Actually Predicts Execution (It's Not Your Competitors)

If competitive orientation doesn't drive completion, what does? When we sort industries by initiative completion rate and look at the underlying structural factors, a consistent pattern emerges:

Two factors stand out:

Portfolio load matters enormously. Technology completes at 23.9% with only 53 initiatives per organization. Government Agency completes at 10.8% with 482. The organizations that finish things are the ones that commit to fewer things. This has nothing to do with competitors and everything to do with internal discipline around focus.

Ownership matters, but not in the way you'd expect. Manufacturing has the highest initiative ownership rate (63.9%) but one of the lower completion rates (14.3%). Financial Services also has high ownership (61.0%) but mediocre completion (15.7%). Ownership is necessary but not sufficient — you need both ownership and reasonable portfolio load. Organizations that assign owners to everything but commit to too many initiatives end up with responsible people who are spread too thin to deliver.

The competitive environment doesn't show up as a predictor. The sector column in that table is effectively random relative to completion rates. What you're competing against externally is irrelevant to whether you finish what you start internally.

Mintzberg Was Right (And So Was Blue Ocean Strategy)

Henry Mintzberg argued in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994) that formal planning processes create an illusion of control — and that the best strategies often emerge from doing and learning rather than from analyzing and predicting. His critique applies directly to competitive analysis: you can't plan your way to competitive advantage by studying your competitors, because by the time you've analyzed their strategy and built a response, the landscape has already shifted.

Kim and Mauborgne made a related argument in Blue Ocean Strategy (2005): the most valuable strategic moves don't respond to existing competitive dynamics at all. They create entirely new market spaces where competition is irrelevant. The organizations in our dataset that execute best aren't the ones with the most sophisticated competitive analysis. They're the ones with the clearest internal focus, the most disciplined portfolios, and the most realistic deadlines.

None of those things require you to know what your competitors are doing.

Case in point: City of Dublin, Ohio

Dublin, a city of about 50,000 outside Columbus, has no competitors in the traditional sense — it's a municipal government. But under the leadership of Brandon Brown, Director of Performance Analytics, they've built one of the most disciplined strategic execution systems in our dataset. Their approach centers on three things: a consistent reporting structure using ClearPoint as a single source of truth, quarterly reviews focused on whether initiatives are producing the intended impact (not just whether they're "on track"), and a culture where data-driven decisions replaced PowerPoint-driven debates.

Dublin didn't benchmark against other cities to build their strategy. They focused on what their citizens needed, built specific objectives and measures around those needs, and executed against their own standards. The result: TNCPE-level recognition and a performance management process that other cities now benchmark against.

The irony is rich. Dublin succeeded by ignoring competitors — and became the competitor everyone else studies.

What This Means for Your SWOT Analysis

I'm not arguing that you should stop doing competitive analysis. Understanding your market, your rivals, and your relative position is useful context. The SWOT analysis and VRIO framework are legitimate tools for generating strategic insight.

But the data is clear: the moment that competitive insight translates into competitively-framed objectives — "beat Company X," "gain market share," "respond to competitive threat" — you've set yourself up for lower execution rates. Those objectives tend to be externally dependent (you can't control what competitors do), vaguely defined (what does "market leadership" look like on March 15?), and impossible to break into concrete milestones.

The better approach: use competitive analysis as an input to your planning process, then write objectives that are entirely within your control. "Reduce customer onboarding time to under 48 hours" is better than "outperform Competitor X on customer experience." The first one has a deadline, a metric, and an owner. The second one depends on what Competitor X does between now and your next quarterly review.

Porter himself landed here in his later work. Strategy isn't about reacting to your competitive environment. It's about making deliberate choices about what you will and won't do — and then executing those choices with discipline. The competitive environment is context, not a blueprint.

What To Do This Week

Five things you can do to shift your planning process from competitor-reactive to internally-disciplined.

1. Audit your objectives for competitive language. Open your strategic plan and search for words like "competitive," "market share," "benchmark," "industry leader," or any named competitor. In our dataset, only 1.28% of objectives use this language — and those objectives produce the lowest completion rates. If your plan has more than a handful, you're over-indexed on competitors.

2. Rewrite competitively-framed objectives as internally-controlled outcomes. "Become the market leader in customer satisfaction" becomes "Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 65 by Q3." "Respond to Competitor X's pricing strategy" becomes "Reduce cost-to-serve by 15% while maintaining service quality." The rewritten versions are specific, measurable, time-bound, and entirely within your control — all of which predict higher completion.

3. Count your initiatives per organization. Technology companies in our dataset average 53 initiatives per org and complete at 23.9%. Government agencies average 482 and complete at 10.8%. If your portfolio is closer to the 482 end, competitive pressure won't save you — you need to cut. The optimal portfolio size is 5-9 goals, 9-11 measures, and 5-8 active projects.

4. Move your competitive analysis to a separate document. Keep the SWOT. Keep the Five Forces. Keep the market intelligence. But put it in a reference document that informs your strategic plan rather than embedding it in your strategic plan. When competitive language shows up in your actual objectives and initiatives, it signals that you're planning around things you can't control.

5. Benchmark your execution, not your strategy. Instead of studying what competitors are planning, study how your own organization executes. What's your initiative completion rate? What's your average duration for completed initiatives? What percentage of your milestones are on track? These internal benchmarks predict future success far more reliably than any competitive analysis. Our dataset is full of organizations with brilliant competitive positioning and single-digit completion rates. Nobody wins a strategy by writing it.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Competitive Strategy

Every industry in our dataset faces competitive pressure of some kind. Even local governments compete — for residents, for businesses, for bond ratings, for talent. The question isn't whether competition matters. It does.

The question is whether studying your competition makes you better at executing your strategy. And the data says it doesn't. The 7.96% completion rate for competitively-oriented initiatives is the lowest in our dataset. The industries with the most intense competitive pressure don't systematically outperform regulated monopolies. And the structural factors that actually predict execution — portfolio focus, realistic deadlines, ownership discipline — have nothing to do with what's happening outside your building.

The most successful organizations in our dataset didn't succeed by out-analyzing their competitors. They succeeded by picking fewer priorities, assigning real owners, setting honest deadlines, and finishing what they started. That's not a competitive strategy. That's just discipline.

And discipline, unlike competitive intelligence, is entirely within your control.

Methodology: This analysis is based on 31.2 million rows of anonymized, aggregated data from ClearPoint Strategy accounts spanning 2017–2025. Objective orientation was determined by keyword analysis of 60,444 objective names. Initiative completion rates were calculated by linking initiatives to objectives within the same scorecard and organization. "Competitive/Private" sector includes Technology, Professional Services, Financial Services, and Manufacturing. "Regulated/Public" includes Energy & Utilities, Local Government, and Government Agency. "Mission-Driven" includes Healthcare and Education. For the full methodology, download the 2026 Strategic Planning Report.

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