Most executives think competition is about better products.
I survived 25+ years watching billion-dollar companies destroy each other over widgets.
Here's the playbook they don't teach at Harvard.
The IH Moment That Changed Everything
International Harvester becoming Navistar. Billion-dollar restructuring. Blood in the boardroom.
Team-building session. (Yeah, I know. Corporate irony.)
The facilitator drops this scenario:
"You need 500 widgets. Your competition needs 500 widgets. Only 1,000 widgets exist. What do you do?"
Room goes quiet. People start calculating fair splits. Discussing partnerships. Talking about long-term supplier relationships.
Wrong.
"You buy 1,000 widgets."
"But we only need—"
"You kill the competition."
That's when I learned Fortune 500 companies don't compete for market share.
They eliminate competitors' ability to compete at all.
The Game Nobody Admits They're Playing
Manufacturing is the oldest, most ruthless industry in America.
Billions at stake. Government contracts. Defense spending. Industrial infrastructure.
Navistar didn't win military contracts because of better engineering.
We won because we could engineer blast-resistant armor for military vehicles while our competitors were still sourcing steel.
We controlled the supply chain.
They controlled nothing.
The stock market figured out the rest.
This Isn't Just Manufacturing
Tech companies buying chip fabrication capacity they don't need? Widget war.
Pharmaceutical companies locking up API suppliers? Widget war.
Cloud providers signing exclusive data center deals? Widget war.
The pattern:
Identify the constraint (the 1,000 widgets)
Control the constraint (buy all 1,000)
Watch competitors suffocate (they can't build anything)
Let the market "naturally" consolidate (your stock rises, theirs crashes)
It's not illegal. It's not even unethical by boardroom standards.
It's just business.
Why Most Executives Lose
They're playing checkers.
The game is chess.
They think:
Build better products
Serve customers well
Compete on innovation
May the best company win
Fortune 500 thinks:
Control critical inputs
Lock competitors out
Win before the game starts
There is no competition
You know why private equity strips companies for parts?
Because they learned the widget lesson.
Assets > Products
Control > Innovation
Constraints > Competition
The MAD Realization
I watched this for 25 years.
Corporate collapses. Industry consolidation. "Market forces" that were anything but natural.
Every time, the pattern repeated:
✅ Company that controlled the constraint survived
❌ Company that competed on "merit" died
The executives who thrived weren't the smartest.
They were the most ruthless about seeing the constraint before anyone else did.
Navistar tracked every truck part's Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). We knew when your truck would break down before you did. We contacted you via satellite to schedule repairs before the breakdown happened.
That's not customer service.
That's control of the constraint.
You couldn't switch to a competitor because we owned your maintenance dependency.
What This Means For You
Right now, in your industry, someone is identifying the constraint.
The critical supplier. The talent bottleneck. The regulatory choke point. The technology platform. The distribution channel.
They're about to buy 1,000 widgets.
Question: Are you buying? Or are you the competition that gets killed?
Most executives won't see it coming.
They're too busy optimizing products nobody can build without widgets they can't access.
The stock market will figure out who wins.
It always does.
The MAD 2.0 Difference
I built MAD 2.0 because pattern recognition beats strategy every time.
Executives don't need more content.
They need intelligence about constraints before constraints become crises.
Visual strategic frameworks that compress 25 years of corporate warfare into 90-second scans.
Not theory.
Survival intel from someone who watched billion-dollar widget wars up close.
Next week: How Navistar turned 800 truck dealerships into the Walmart of trucks.
(Hint: It wasn't about selling more trucks.)
Stop Reading. Start Seeing.
P.S. - If you're still thinking "but we compete on innovation," you're already losing the widget war. The companies that will dominate your industry in 5 years are buying constraints right now while you're perfecting features. MAD 2.0 shows you the constraints before your competitors see them. [Get strategic intelligence here →]