Imagine opening a grocery store where Walmart lives.
Not competing with Walmart. Competing with Walmart in northwest Arkansas, where the company is headquartered, where its executives shop, where its distribution network is thickest and its prices are sharpest.
That is the retail equivalent of opening a coffee shop inside somebody's kitchen.
And yet there is a grocery chain there that has been growing for decades. Not surviving. Growing, into a network of stores across several states, owned by the people who work in them.
It did not win on price. Nobody wins on price against that company. It would be like racing a train.
So what did it do instead?
The answer is a set of decisions that look small individually and turn out to be the only viable strategy available to anybody competing with a giant.