Asking For Competitors Quotes

So Haymitch, what do you think of the games have one hundred percent more competitors than usual?” asks Caesar. Haymitch shrugs. “I don’t see that it makes that much difference. They’ll still be one hundred percent as stupid as usual, so I figure my odds will be roughly the same.

Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.

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There was also the time that competitors were asked to submit a paragraph of a Graham Greene parody: Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and placed third.

What the field needed, he argued, was what he called inverse reinforcement learning. Rather than asking, as regular reinforcement learning does, “Given a reward signal, what behavior will optimize it?,” inverse reinforcement learning (or “IRL”) asks the reverse: “Given the observed behaviour, what reward signal, if any, is being optimized?”15 This is, of course, in more informal terms, one of the foundational questions of human life. What exactly do they think they’re doing? We spend a good fraction of our life’s brainpower answering questions like this. We watch the behavior of others around us—friend and foe, superior and subordinate, collaborator and competitor—and try to read through their visible actions to their invisible intentions and goals. It is in some ways the cornerstone of human cognition. It also turns out to be one of the seminal and critical projects in twenty-first-century AI.

story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and colleagues. His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged

It is far better to ask what your competitors will likely do before you proceed than to simply wait and see what happens. Only strategies that provide a sustainable advantage—or a significant lead in developing future advantages—are worth investing in.

look at what your competitors do, and ask yourself a series of questions: “Are their strategy and goals the same as mine?” If their strategy and beliefs are different, and you still have conviction in your own, then you shouldn’t be distracted. Stay the course.

3 STEPS FOR APPLYING DISTINCT VALUE Step 1: Understand what matters to your buyers. Step 2: Identify something about your company, product, or service that competitors cannot match. Step 3: Convey steps 1 and 2 to buyers and ask for their buy-in to the value you have presented.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service. How can they put you out of business? Is it price? Is it service? Is it ease of use? No product is perfect and if there are good competitors in your market, they will figure out how to abuse you. It’s always better if you are honest with yourself and anticipate where the problems will co​me from.

So, Haymitch, what do you think of the Games having one hundred percent more competitors than usual?” asks Caesar. Haymitch shrugs. “I don’t see that it makes much difference. They’ll still be one hundred percent as stupid as usual, so I figure my odds will be roughly the same.” The audience bursts out laughing and Haymitch gives them a half smile. Snarky. Arrogant. Indifferent.

The first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier to eat? This question led him to experiment and gather the feedback that changed the game. Only by redefining the problem was he able to discover a new set of solutions.

When the Game Boy was released, Yokoi’s colleague came to him “with a grim expression on his face,” Yokoi recalled, and reported that a competitor handheld had hit the market. Yokoi asked him if it had a color screen. The man said that it did. “Then we’re fine,” Yokoi replied. Yokoi’s strategy of finding novel uses for technology, after others had moved on, smacks of exactly what a well-known psychological creativity exercise asks for.

We started with weekly learnings sessions for our top sixty leaders: two hours every week together as one team, with the premise that we would no longer judge outcomes as good or bad, we would just read the outcomes as outcomes, learn from them, and quickly improve. The goal was to outlearn our competitors. We would stop the shaming and blaming and the judging of outcomes as good or bad, and instead continuously ask ourselves, “What did we set out to do, what happened, what did we learn, and how fast can we improve on it?

At least she was good at archaeology, she mused, even if she was a dismal failure as a woman in Tate’s eyes. “She’s been broody ever since we got here,” Leta said with pursed lips as she glanced from Tate to Cecily. “You two had a blowup, huh?” she asked, pretending innocence. Tate drew in a short breath. “She poured crab bisque on me in front of television cameras.” Cecily drew herself up to her full height. “Pity it wasn’t flaming shish kebab!” she returned fiercely. Leta moved between them. “The Sioux wars are over,” she announced. “That’s what you think,” Cecily muttered, glaring around her at the tall man. Tate’s dark eyes began to twinkle. He’d missed her in his life. Even in a temper, she was refreshing, invigorating. She averted her eyes to the large grass circle outlined by thick corded string. All around it were make-shift shelters on poles, some with canvas tops, with bales of hay to make seats for spectators. The first competition of the day was over and the winners were being announced. A woman-only dance came next, and Leta grimaced as she glanced from one warring face to the other. If she left, there was no telling what might happen. “That’s me,” she said reluctantly, adjusting the number on her back. “Got to run. Wish me luck.” “You know I do,” Cecily said, smiling at her. “Don’t disgrace us,” Tate added with laughter in his eyes. Leta made a face at him, but smiled. “No fighting,” she said, shaking a finger at them as she went to join the other competitors. Tate’s granitelike face had softened as he watched his mother. Whatever his faults, he was a good son.

THE 12 COMMANDMENTS OF BOSSES’ DIRTY WORK How to Implement Tough Decisions in Effective and Humane Ways Do not delay painful decisions and actions; hoping the problem will go away or that someone else will do your dirty work rarely is an effective path. Assume that you are clueless, or at least have only a dim understanding, of how people judge you and the dirty work that you do. Implement tough decisions as well as you can – even if they strike you as wrong or misguided. Or get out of the way and let someone else do it. Do everything possible to communicate to all who will be affected how distressing events will unfold, so they can predict when bad things will (and will not) happen to them. Explain early and often why the dirty work is necessary. Look for ways to give employees influence over how painful changes happen to them, even when it is impossible to change what will happen to them. Never humiliate, belittle, or bad-mouth people who are the targets of your dirty work. Ask yourself and fellow bosses to seriously consider if the dirty work is really necessary before implementing it. Just because all your competitors do it, or you have always done it in the past, does not mean it is wise right now. Do not bullshit or lie to employees, as doing so can destroy their loyalty and confidence, along with your reputation. Keep your big mouth shut. Divulging sensitive or confidential information can harm employees, your organization, and you, too. Refrain from doing mean-spirited things to exact personal revenge against employees who resist or object to your dirty work. Do not attempt dirty work if you lack the power to do it right, no matter how necessary it may seem.

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors. The Magic Circle of the Modern Economy It was lose-lose. Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because it did not grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

The evidence for the cognitive interpretation of the above-average effect is that when people are asked about a task they find difficult (for many of us this could be “Are you better than average in starting conversations with strangers?”), they readily rate themselves as below average. The upshot is that people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well. I have had several occasions to ask founders and participants in innovative start-ups a question: To what extent will the outcome of your effort depend on what you do in your firm? This is evidently an easy question; the answer comes quickly and in my small sample it has never been less than 80%. Even when they are not sure they will succeed, these bold people think their fate is almost entirely in their own hands. They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts. However, WYSIATI plays its part, and entrepreneurs naturally focus on what they know best—their plans and actions and the most immediate threats and opportunities, such as the availability of funding. They know less about their competitors and therefore find it natural to imagine a future in which the competition plays little part.

We have a system we follow every time we get asked to create a product logo. Clients like the work we produce and we’re able to charge a good dollar because clients know a product logo is something they will use for a long time. Once we create one product logo, we have our foot in the door and clients often come back as they launch new products.” Ted considered Alex’s conclusion. “Tell me about the system you follow for creating logos.” “It’s nothing too formal, but we always start off by asking the client to describe their vision for their product and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.” Ted began to make notes. “That sounds like a good first step. Let’s call it Visioning.” Step 1: Visioning “What’s the next step?” asked Ted. “After we establish the client’s goals, we go through an exercise where we ask the client to personify their product. For example, we’ll ask questions like, ‘If your product was a famous actor, who would it be?’ and ‘If your product was a rock star, who would it be?’ One of our favorite questions is a little goofy: ‘If your product was a cookie, what kind of cookie would it be?’ These questions force the client to think about the personality they want to come through in their logo.” “That sounds unique, Alex. Let’s call that step two and give it a name like Personification.” Step 2: Personification “What’s your next step in designing a logo?” “We then go back to the office and use a pencil and paper to freehand sketch

One way Dan demonstrates to his students the concept of sunk cost is through a game in which participants bid to purchase a $100 bill. Rule #1: Bidding starts at $5. Rule #2: Bids can only increase by $5 at a time. Rule #3: The winner pays the amount of his or her final bid and gets the $100. The last rule is that the second-highest bidder also pays what he or she has bid, but gets nothing. As the game progresses, the bids rise to $50 and $55, at which point Dan will have made money. (The $55 bidder will pay $55 to get $100 and the second bidder will pay $50 and get nothing.) At some point, someone bids $85 and a competitor bids $90. At that point, Dan stops them and reminds them that the first person will win $10 ($100 minus $90) and the second person will lose $85. He asks the $85 bidder whether they want to continue to $95. Inevitably, they say yes. Then he asks the first person the same question, and he happily agrees to go to $100. But it doesn’t stop there at $100. Next, Dan asks the person who’s bid $95 if they want to go to $105. As before, if they say no, they’ll lose their previous bid: $95. But at this point, when the bidding is over $100, if they say yes, that means they are now actively bidding knowing that they will lose money. This time it’s $5 ($105 bid minus $100 winnings), but the loss will only increase from there. Inevitably, both participants keep bidding higher and higher until at some point one person realizes how crazy this is and they stop (and the person stopping ends up losing $95 more).

March 4 Could This Be True of Me? But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself. Acts 20:24 It is easier to serve God without a vision, easier to work for God without a call, because then you are not bothered by what God requires; common sense is your guide, veneered over with Christian sentiment. You will be more prosperous and successful, more leisure-hearted, if you never realise the call of God. But if once you receive a commission from Jesus Christ, the memory of what God wants will always come like a goad; you will no longer be able to work for Him on the commonsense basis. What do I really count dear? If I have not been gripped by Jesus Christ, I will count service dear, time given to God dear, my life dear unto myself. Paul says he counted his life dear only in order that he might fulfil the ministry he had received; he refused to use his energy for any other thing. Acts 20:24 states Paul’s almost sublime annoyance at being asked to consider himself; he was absolutely indifferent to any consideration other than that of fulfilling the ministry he had received. Practical work may be a competitor against abandonment to God, because practical work is based on this argument—“Remember how useful you are here,” or—“Think how much value you would be in that particular type of work.” That attitude does not put Jesus Christ as the Guide as to where we should go, but our judgement as to where we are of most use. Never consider whether you are of use; but ever consider that you are not your own but His.

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

Also, I’ve been meaning to explain this to you. When I show my teeth, it’s not a display of power or dominance. I’m smiling. It means I’m amused or happy.” “Truly?” That astonished him. He never would have made that connection on his own. “Would it trouble you not to clarify this to others? It makes you less imposing.” “Uh, sure. They can keep thinking it’s a scary battle face, I don’t mind.” “Thank you, Terrible One.” “What did I say about working on your endearments?” she snapped. Zylar processed the reaction, but he didn’t understand her outrage. “It is a compliment. You will behold many fearsome competitors in the Choosing, but I do not believe anyone can best you.” “It’s a cultural thing, I get that. But if you want to put a smile on my face, call me sweetheart or baby or…” She stopped talking, likely reading his horror. “Why would I comment on the delectable nature of your organs?” Zylar shuddered delicately. “It’s even worse to infantilize you.” She tilted her head. “Shit, since you put it that way, now I don’t like those options either. Then…just use my name, okay?” “Yes, Beryl. That I will do gladly.” He set off again, pleased with how readily they’d reached a sensible compromise. “What does your name mean?” “It’s a mineral found on Earth. A gemstone, to be precise. The best known types are emerald and aquamarine, but I’m honestly glad my mom didn’t get more specific.” “These gemstones are valuable, yes?” “Some of them. Why?” Ignoring the question, Zylar churred in satisfaction. “You are well named, my unexpected treasure.” “I…thanks.” She ducked her head, and the color of her cheeks shifted, darkening with what looked like it might be an injury. “Are you well enough to compete?” he asked. “We’ll find out.

In Hollywood today, the simple truth is that there are two types of movie studios: Disney, and those that wish they were Disney. Understanding why studios have turned so aggressively toward franchises, sequels, and superheroes and away from originality, risks, and mid-budget dramas takes more than an appreciation for the financial pressures faced by executives like Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal. Just as Olympic swimmers can’t help but pace themselves against Michael Phelps, Sony and its competitors have for years been jealous of and frustrated by Disney. Hollywood is a herd industry. Its executives are constantly looking out the side window or at the rearview mirror and asking, “Why aren’t we doing that?” For those peering at Disney, that means slashing the number of movies made per year by two-thirds. It also means largely abandoning any type of film that costs less than $100 million, is based on an original idea, or appeals to any group smaller than all the moviegoers around the globe. Disney doesn’t make dramas for adults. It doesn’t make thrillers. It doesn’t make romantic comedies. It doesn’t make bawdy comedies. It doesn’t make horror movies. It doesn’t make star vehicles. It doesn’t adapt novels. It doesn’t buy original scripts. It doesn’t buy anything at film festivals. It doesn’t make anything political or controversial. It doesn’t make anything with an R-rating. It doesn’t give award-winning directors like Alfonso Cuarón or Christopher Nolan wide latitude to pursue their visions.

I met with Chad Logan a few days after our first get-together. I told him that I would explain my point of view and then let him decide whether he wanted to work with me on strategy. I said: I think you have a lot of ambition, but you don’t have a strategy. I don’t think it would be useful, right now, to work with your managers on strategies for meeting the 20/20 goal. What I would advise is that you first work to discover the very most promising opportunities for the business. Those opportunities may be internal, fixing bottlenecks and constraints in the way people work, or external. To do this, you should probably pull together a small team of people and take a month to do a review of who your buyers are, who you compete with, and what opportunities exist. It’s normally a good idea to look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition. You should open things up so there are as many useful bits of information on the table as possible. If you want, I can help you structure some of this process and, maybe, help you ask some of the right questions. The end result will be a strategy that is aimed at channeling energy into what seem to be one or two of the most attractive opportunities, where it looks like you can make major inroads or breakthroughs. I can’t tell you in advance how large such opportunities are, or where they may be. I can’t tell you in advance how fast revenues will grow. Perhaps you will want to add new services, or cut back on doing certain things that don’t make a profit. Perhaps you will find it more promising to focus on grabbing the graphics work that currently goes in-house, rather than to competitors. But, in the end, you should have a very short list of the most important things for the company to do. Then you will have a basis for moving forward. That is what I would do were I in your shoes. If you continue down the road you are on you will be counting on motivation to move the company forward. I cannot honestly recommend that as a way forward because business competition is not just a battle of strength and wills; it is also a competition over insights and competencies. My judgment is that motivation, by itself, will not give this company enough of an edge to achieve your goals. Chad Logan thanked me and, a week later, retained someone else to help him. The new consultant took Logan and his department managers through an exercise he called “Visioning.” The gist of it was the question “How big do you think this company can be?” In the morning they stretched their aspirations from “bigger” to “very much bigger.” Then, in the afternoon, the facilitator challenged them to an even grander vision: “Think twice as big as that,” he pressed. Logan

Our core competencies did not extend to either end of the value chain. Steve did not let this get in the way. In one of our meetings, he said that a typical company that wanted to grow would take stock of its existing capabilities and ask, “What can we do next with our skill set?” He emphasized that Amazon’s approach was always to start from the customer and work backwards. We would figure out what the customers’ needs were and then ask ourselves, “Do we have the skills necessary to build something that meets those needs? If not, how can we build or acquire them?” Once we determined what was necessary to create value for our customers and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, we didn’t let our lack of ability deter us from achieving this important end result—our own device.

This game requires you to carry the load on your shoulders and press on in the face of fear. Whether it’s your first business or your hundredth, you’re going to ask yourself the same questions at some point: Is this going to fall apart? Am I going to be found out as a fraud? Did one of my competitors already come up with a better version of this? That little voice breaks most people. True-born entrepreneurs move through it because they’ve been working through fear their whole lives.

One of my mastermind members, Travis Killian, once told me about how he gets products to stand out in a busy, loud marketplace. His answer was simple: “We listen to people. We execute so many split tests, it’s insane. We’ll mock up the product and ask people, Which do you like better? This one or this other one from our competitor? We do that for all the top competitors in the market, all the ones we think have the best products in the niche.” Split testing requires nothing more than asking people which one of two things they like better. That’s it. Show someone two items, and ask for his or her preference. It’s one of those rare things that happens to be simple, easy, and effective. “I remember one time, when we were just starting out,” Travis told me, “we paid one of our friends to go to the mall in Austin, show pictures of our products versus our competitor’s products, and collect survey answers on which one they preferred.” If it sounds like a ton of time and money to pay someone to do inperson surveys and split testing, Travis says that’s not even essential. “When we started out, that’s what we did. Now, we use services online to run constant split tests of our products against our competitors’ products. The most important thing is to get the feedback on why survey respondents have a preference. Why do they like the other guy’s product over mine? That’s the data we really want to collect. We spend our time analyzing that data and applying it to the products—deciding first if the feedback is something we can, and want, to address, and then making changes from there.

If your digital supply chain is better than your competitors’, you’ll be in a much stronger position to succeed.

God is like the sky, like the empty sky. It has no boundaries so it cannot be defined. You cannot say where it begins and where it ends. It is eternal, it is infinite -- yet it is right in this place, just in front of you. If you are relaxed it is there; if you become tense it disappears. Life cannot be possessed because life is God. Existence cannot be possessed because existence is God. YOU CANNOT TAKE HOLD OF IT. -- remember -- BUT YOU CANNOT LOSE IT. Yes, you cannot possess it, but there is no way to lose it either. It is there. It is always there. You have to drop your rush, your hurry, your ideas to go somewhere, to reach, to become, to be this and that. You have to stop becoming. And it is there; you cannot lose it. There is no competition, there is nobody blocking your way, there are no competitors. You need not be in a hurry. You need not make any effort to grab. There is nobody competing with you and there is nobody standing in front of you -- only God, only God. You can relax. You need not be afraid that you will miss it. You cannot miss it in the very nature of things. You cannot lose him. You relax. There is no hurry because God is not something in time -- relax. There is nowhere to go because God is not distant in some star -- relax. You cannot miss in the very nature of things -- relax. relax. Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand -- relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it. God is so big, so huge, so enormous. It is the totality of existence -- who can exhaust it? There is no struggle, no competition. And there is eternal time available. Don't be in a hurry and don't be serious.

Lincoln, unlike many executives, had no fear of surrounding himself with strong-willed subordinates who might overshadow him. When advised not to appoint Salmon P. Chase to a cabinet post because the Ohioan regarded himself as “a great deal bigger” than the president-elect, Lincoln asked: “Well, do you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am? I want to put them all in my cabinet.”5 He included every major competitor at the Chicago Convention in his cabinet, a decision that required unusual self-confidence, a quality misunderstood by some, including his assistant personal secretary, John Hay. Deeming modesty “the most fatal and most unsympathetic of vices” and the “bane of genius, the chain-and-ball of enterprise,” Hay argued that it was “absurd to call him a modest man.”6 But Hay was projecting onto his boss his own immodesty. Lincoln was, in fact, both remarkably modest and self-confident, and he had no need to surround himself with sycophants dependent on him for political preferment. Instead he chose men with strong personalities, large egos, and politically significant followings whose support was necessary for the administration’s success.

The three rules for speaking with the media: Answer the question you want to be asked. If someone asks a very difficult or challenging question, reframe it into one that you’re comfortable answering. Don’t accept a question’s implicit framing, but instead take the opportunity to frame it yourself. Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff 32 is a phenomenal, compact guide to framing issues. Stay positive. Negative stories can be very compelling. They are quite risky, too! As an interviewee, find a positive framing and stick to it. This is especially true when it comes to competitors and controversy. Speak in threes. Narrow your message down to three concise points, make them your refrain, and continue to refer back to your three speaking points.

When I was a certified small business and startup mentor for several Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs), after several months I came to realize that most business owners saw websites as "one and done" items rather than as company portals through which valuable and important processes could go through -while concurrently promoting their business online 24/7 through multiple online channels. Set your goals higher and ask yourself "how can we automate what takes up so much of our time and energy" and "how can we learn from and mirror the strategies of larger, more profitable competitors?

Heads of companies often inadvertently contribute to this confusion. Some time ago a business reporter told me of an encounter with the head of a major Japanese corporation. The reporter was working on a profile of the company. When he asked questions that tried to clarify the strategy of the corporation, the other man angrily retorted, “Why would I tell you our strategy? So I could help our competitors?” I think this man wouldn’t talk about his strategy not because he was afraid of helping his competitors but because he didn’t have one: this company’s public statements have always struck me as extraordinarily ambiguous.

Define the Profitable Core In our experience, business definition is one of the most frustrating activities for senior executives. Although business leaders know that they should have a clear answer to the question, “What is our core business?” it is difficult to arrive at a fully satisfying statement. Part of the problem arises from blurring several distinct but related topics that need to be considered one at a time and then integrated in a consistent manner or within a single framework. In working toward a useful business definition, executives need to ask themselves the following questions: What are the boundaries of the business in which I participate, and are those boundaries “natural” economic boundaries defined by customer needs and basic economics? What products, customers, channels, and competitors do these boundaries encompass? What are the core skills and assets needed to compete effectively within that competitive arena? What is my own core business as defined by those customers, products, technologies, and channels through which I can earn a return today and can compete effectively with my current resources? What is the key differentiating factor that makes me unique to my core customers? What are the adjacent areas around my core, and are the definitions of my business and my industry likely to shift, changing the competitive and customer landscape?

Finding the Competitive Levers When there’s a battle between two networks, there are competitive levers that shift users from one into the other—what are they? The best place to focus in the rideshare market was the hard side of the network: drivers. More drivers meant that prices would be lower, attracting valuable high-frequency riders that often comparison shop for fares. Attract more riders, and it more efficiently fills the time of drivers, and vice versa. There was a double benefit to moving drivers from a competitor’s network to yours—it would push their network into surging prices while yours would lower in price. Uber’s competitive levers would combine financial incentives—paying up for more sign-ups, more hours—with product improvements to improve Acquisition, Engagement, and Economic forces. Drawing in more drivers through product improvements is straightforward—the better the experience of picking up riders and routing the car to their destination, the more the app would be used. Building a better product is one of the classic levers in the tech industry, but Uber focused much of its effort on targeted bonuses for drivers. Why bonuses? Because for drivers, that was their primary motivation for using the app, and improving their earnings would make them sticky. But these bonuses weren’t just any bonuses—they were targeted at quickly flipping over the most valuable drivers in the networks of Uber’s rivals, targeting so-called dual apping drivers that were active on multiple networks. They were given large, special bonuses that compelled them to stick to Uber, and every hour they drove was an hour that the other networks couldn’t utilize. There was a sophisticated effort to tag drivers as dual appers. Some of these efforts were just manual—Uber employees who took trips would just ask if the drivers drove for other services, and they could mark them manually in a special UI within the app. There were also behavioral signals when drivers were running two apps—they would often pause their Uber session for a few minutes while they drove for another company, then unpause it. On Android, there were direct APIs that could tell if someone was running Uber and Lyft at the same time. Eventually a large number of these signals were fed into a machine learning model where each driver would receive a score based on how likely they were to be a dual apper. It didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough to aid the targeting.

Now, Porter explains in his book: “To identify a new value chain, a firm must examine everything it does, as well as its competitors' value chains, in search of creative options to do things differently. A firm should ask questions including ‘How can the activity be performed differently or even eliminated?

Waze’s triumph and Navteq’s decline should be the model for every budding ExO. Ask yourself, “Which of my products or services can I digitize and dematerialize?” and “How can I use the Six Ds to leapfrog my biggest linear competitors? How can I use them to demonetize and democratize my products and/or services?

You think what you do to ruin competitors is bad. Well, the twins fuck up anyone who so much as looks at them the wrong way. I once walked in on both of them covered in blood, ‘playing’ with a man while he was hanging from the ceiling by his hands. And let’s just say, he survived. Because they are that good. They know where to cut and how to cut to draw the pain out. And if you’re on their radar, then you’re in serious shit.” “I think I want to marry her,” I tell him in awe. “Have you met her?” he asks in disbelief. “You really want more than what she gave you?” “I fucking want it all,” I insist. “Well, we can’t say you haven’t been warned,” Dawson adds, shaking his head as if I’m the crazy one. “You know me, Dawson. Do you really think for a second I couldn’t handle her?” “River, I get that you run a very successful business because people know not to fuck with you, but she will never be that person. She will fuck with you. Take every cent you have and let you bleed out but won’t kill you just so you know who took it.” “I plan to marry her,” I tell him. “She can bleed me dry.” “You really don’t know what she’s capable of, then,” he chastises. “I’m certainly keen to find out. She’ll be mine within the month,” I tell him confidently.

Take as many as you want,” Ebenezer said. “Consider it a gift from one farmer to another.” “Are you sure?” Drake asked. “We’re competitors, after all.” “Nonsense.” The old man stood from his chair. “We grow food that people enjoy. There’s no competition there, just collaboration. Farming is an act of love — of both the people around us and the earth itself.

Consistent actions build respect, not words. I worked to develop my mass—that sense of who you are—into something that pulled others in. Since I was attracted to those who were tough and real, my roommates were Terry Brands, one of the more ferocious competitors in NCAA history, and Travis Fisher, a hard-nosed, small town Iowa boy. They asked me to room with them, and I jumped at the opportunity. I based every decision on principles that would lead me to greatness on the mat. Terry and Travis were blessings to live with as both had jumped the gap from believing to committing. I’ve learned Elite people have a bias toward action.

What, you might ask, has happened to Schumpeter's powerful forces of creative destruction? Barriers to entry-whether regulatory barriers, the cost of investment, or anticompetitive behavior by the corporations themselves-allow monopolistic firms to retain their power by preventing new firms from entering the industry. In big tech, large incumbents police the so-called kill zone in their marketplace by "hoovering up or squashing any potential competitors." Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have, between them, "collectively bought over 436 companies and startups in the past 10 years and regulators have not challenged any of them.

was spinning his own version of reality both to me and to himself. To check and flesh out his story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and colleagues. His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the

So what are we doing with this ability? I asked. Are we blackmailing governments or companies? Give us money or we blast your satellites into smithereens. Trying to blackmail the US or China would be a really good way to have St Genevieve turned into a smoking crater. A stupid villain threatens, Charlie. A smarter villain offers a service. ..So we offer satellite blasting services? We have a select clientele who, for an annual retainer fee, have the option to use our ability to enact logistical challenges to their competitors. In space. So that's a yes.

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

In reviewing a business model, the key question executives should ask is this: Do the choices we have made about the company’s structure reflect our choice of primary customer? If the answer is no, competitors whose business models are consistent with their chosen primary customer will almost certainly be outplaying you.

Unlike its competitors who sell pre-assembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there’s a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product — by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, Ariely believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments. Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor.

Another aspect of concentration which intrigues me was a batsman’s ability to actually find a gap by remembering the field settings and then playing the ball through the fielders. A ball that was thrown at him at 150 kmph! The commentators always mention how the batsmen found beautiful gaps and that irritated the hell out of me because as a mediocre cricketer I never reached a stage in my batting where I could actually place the ball in a certain direction. So I once gathered the courage to ask Ricky Ponting if batsmen really found the gaps or was it merely a matter of luck. I knew it was a brave question but what I did not expect was a life philosophy that was one of the most impactful one I have heard in a long time. He said, “Ya mate, batting is an an instinct you hone over years of practice and that enables you to reach a level of expertise where you see the field placements in your mind. A good batsman imprints the fielders in the sub-conscious, but an excellent batsman imprints the gaps. There was a time I used to do the former and hit to the fielders but the moment I started to do the latter I found the gaps.” I was stunned by this analogy. When I mentioned this philosophy to my friend Rajiv Bajaj, the MD of Bajaj Auto he immediately added his business perspective to the same and said, “Exactly! In business, if you focus on the competitors you’ll start behaving like them. But if you focus on the gaps in the market you’ll become a champion company.

February 2 The Constraint of the Call Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel! 1 Corinthians 9:16 Beware of stopping your ears to the call of God. Everyone who is saved is called to testify to the fact; but that is not the call to preach, it is merely an illustration in preaching. Paul is referring to the pangs produced in him by the constraint to preach the Gospel. Never apply what Paul says in this connection to souls coming in contact with God for salvation. There is nothing easier than getting saved because it is God’s sovereign work—“Come unto Me and I will save you.” Our Lord never lays down the conditions of discipleship as the conditions of salvation. We are condemned to salvation through the Cross of Jesus Christ. Discipleship has an option with it—“IF any man . . .” Paul’s words have to do with being made a servant of Jesus Christ, and our permission is never asked as to what we will do or where we will go. God makes us broken bread and poured-out wine to please Himself. To be “separated unto the gospel” means to hear the call of God; and when a man begins to overhear that call, then begins agony that is worthy of the name. Every ambition is nipped in the bud, every desire of life quenched, every outlook completely extinguished and blotted out, saving one thing only—“separated unto the gospel.” Woe be to the soul who tries to put his foot in any other direction when once that call has come to him. This College exists to see whether God has any man or woman here who cares about proclaiming His Gospel; to see whether God grips you. And beware of competitors when God does grip you.

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

For a king among people is one whom no-one rules but God the most high, and who does not need anything except God-great and glorious. And with that he rules his kingdom insofar as his soldiers and his subjects obey him. Yet the kingdom proper to him is his own heart and soul, where his soldiers are his appetites, his anger, and his affections; while his subjects are his tongue, his eyes, his hands, and the rest of his organs. If he rules them and they do not rule him, and if they obey him and he does not obey them, he will attain the level of a king in this world. And if that be coupled with the fact that he is independent of all people, yet all people are in need of him for their life now and in the future, he will be an earthly king. This is the level of the prophets-may God's blessings be upon all of them. For they have no need of direction to the next life from anyone except God-great and glorious-while everyone needs it from them. They are followed in this kingship by religious scholars, who 'inherit the legacy of the prophets', Their kingship, however, is proportional to their ability to guide the people, and to their lack of need for asking for guidance. By means of these attributes man comes close to the angels in qualities, and by means of them approaches God the most high. This kingship is a gift to man from the true king whose sovereignty has no competitor.

Me: “Why does competitor X have five times your revenue?” Entrepreneur: “We are using partners and OEMs, because we can’t build a direct channel like competitor X.” Me: “Why not? If you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?” Entrepreneur: “Ummm.” Me: “Stop looking for the silver bullet.” There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?

Google was in the water when the waves of Internet traffic came because it was tinkering with new ideas under the umbrella of Google’s famous “20% Time.” “20% Time” is not Google indigenous. It was borrowed from a company formerly known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, aka 3M, which allowed its employees to spend 15 percent of their work hours experimenting with new ideas, no questions asked. 3M’s “15% Time” brought us, among other things, Post-it Notes. Behind this concept (which is meticulously outlined in an excellent book by Ryan Tate called The 20% Doctrine) is the idea of constantly tinkering with potential trends—having a toe in interesting waters in case waves form. This kind of budgeted experimentation helps businesses avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise use to ride past them. It’s helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Condé Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued. In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and too fearful to experiment often get overtaken. For example, lack of experimentation in digital media has cost photo brand Kodak nearly $ 30 billion in market capitalization since the digital photography wave overwhelmed it in the late ’90s. The best way to be in the water when the wave comes is to budget time for swimming.

In medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. Asking the right questions will help you discover a person’s needs and concerns so that you can respond intelligently and appropriately. Yet salespeople, consultants, or managers often try to push their solutions on you before they even know what your needs are. This is a fast way to alienate people and push you toward their competitor, isn’t it?

If your client isn’t winning in the marketplace, ask, “What is the competitor doing that we aren’t?

Here are the types of questions I consider asking during product analysis: What is the nature of the product? (What are its benefits? Why would someone buy it?) Is it a commodity good or a unique good? (Could the company increase differentiation?) Are there any complementary goods? (Can the company piggyback off growth in complements or near complements?) Are there any substitutes? (Is the company vulnerable to indirect competitors, namely substitutes?) What is the product’s life cycle? (Is it new or almost obsolete?) How is it packaged? (This is an optional question. Is anything bundled or included with the product—for example, just a razor versus a razor with replacement blades, or just a product versus a product with a service contract? Would a change in the product’s packaging make the product more likely to meet specific consumer segments’ needs?) If you selectively ask questions about these product-related topics, you can uncover insights that will help you refine your hypotheses and ultimately serve your client more effectively.

If I do any company analysis at all, I almost always ask two specific questions related to this topic: What does this company do well? What does this company do differently than its competitors?

Candidate: I sense we’re just missing something critical. Something is causing this to happen. Either customers have changed in a way that has benefited our competitors but not our client, or competitors have changed in a way that attracts new business but we haven’t. (Note how I framed the issue in concrete terms: Either competitors or customers have changed. Laying out an issue in this structured way makes it easier for the interviewer to follow your logic. I could just as easily have said, “I think we need to look into the customers themselves,” or I could have started asking questions about customers. The problem with diving in this way is that it doesn’t give the interviewer any insight into the organization of your thought process. Are you asking questions like a reporter would, or are you asking questions for a specific purpose?

The more concentrated the competition, the more you have to worry about it. If you don’t realize when a case involves high competitor concentration, you could easily make a strategic recommendation that’s flat-out wrong. The easiest way to assess competitor concentration is to ask the following questions: How many competitors are there? How big are they (in terms of sales or market share)?

Questions to ask when analyzing a business Business - How does the company make money? - Does it seem like it should be a good business? Is it competitive? Do suppliers have too much power? Do customers value the product? Are there substitutes? - Without looking at financials, how does the company seem like it has done against competitors in its industry in terms of executing on its vision? - What reputation does the management team have? Do they seem honest? Straightforward? Valuation - What is the company's P/E multiple? Is it high or low for its industry? For the overall market right now? Why might the stock be trading at this valuation? - What is the company's free-cash flow yield? Is this a relevant metric given the stage the company is in? How does it compare to similar companies? - Is the company growing faster or more slowly than other companies with similar multiples? - Based on the number alone, does the company seem to have a rich valuation or a cheap valuation? Why might this be the case? Financials - What has been the trajectory of revenue growth over the past ten years? Why? What is it expected to do in the future? - How has the company's industry been growing? Is the company gaining or losing share in its industry? - What is the company’s level of profit margins? How does it compare to other companies in its industry? - How have margins varied over the past ten years? Why? - What percentage  of the company's costs are fixed costs versus variable costs? - What is the company's historical return on capital? Why is it high/low? What does this say about the quality of the business? - What is the trend in returns on capital? Why? What does this say about the returns the company will have to make on its future investments? - What is the company's dividend policy? Why? If they are paying no dividend or a small dividend, is there a danger that the company's management will waste shareholder's money? Technical - How have the company's shares performed against the overall market and its industry over the past twelve months? - What seems to be driving this under/over performance? - What key news events are likely to impact the stock in the future? - Do mutual funds and other large institutional investors seem to be buying or selling the shares? Sentiment and Expectations - What are the consensus earnings estimates for the next quarter and year? Do they seem aggressive or conservative? - Does consensus opinion seem overly bullish or bearish about the company's future prospects? - What insight do you have that the market might be missing that will cause the shares to appreciate?

An in-depth, introspective analysis is required. It needs to be objective, candid, and thorough. Good questions, like the following, can help. They may not produce perfectly clear answers, but they are a starting point. (Note that they are from an external perspective to give you some distance from internal biases.) What would our competitors say we do exceptionally well? Where are we dominant in the marketplace? Where do we have high market share? Where have others attempted to compete with us and failed? If we asked members to play “word association” with us, when we say the “XYZ Association” what word or phrase would come immediately to mind? If we asked members to identify the one thing that we do that helps them most, what would they say? What are we not doing that we should be doing that expands on existing strength? Don’t allow your association to operate on “pseudo strength.” Make sure your strength is real.

Mrs. Latham, president of the Victorian Oaks Preservation Society, hadn't said much about the nature of this meeting when she'd called a week ago. And Hayley hadn't even thought to ask, she'd been so overjoyed that the proposal from her tiny restoration firm had made the short list. Even with the size of the project-nine separate houses to fully restore-she knew she could do it. She wouldn't be alone. In the projects she'd tackled so far, Hayley had found a reliable group of subcontractors that didn't mind working for an untried woman, young enough to be a daughter to some of them. What she lacked in experience, she hoped she made up for in passion for the work and an ardent commitment to historical accuracy. But what did Mrs. Latham hope to accomplish in meeting with both her and her only competitor together? For an instant, Hayley wished she'd bought herself a briefcase. Still, with her delicate features and flyaway straight, looking businesslike was just a dream. The door opened, revealing an immaculately uniformed maid.

A tofu birthday cake dosn't wreak a marriage; but if you cut the tofu into lewd shapes, you are probably asking for trouble. Looking back, I think we stopped being kind to each other. And we became competitors.... Love cannot be sustained under these conditions, any more that yeast will proof in cold water.

If a market has X number of Google searches every single month, and there are Y number of competitors, and the click prices on Google AdWords are in the reasonable range, then it’s a contender.

Even if an omniscient deity was sitting on a cloud watching Arena Mode, I doubt he would have intervened. He wasn’t going to divinely bestow any of the competitors with the strength and ability to win the tournament just because they asked – no more than he decided the outcome of the Superbowl based on the quarterback’s faith, or granted a music award to the rapper who wore the most impressive gold cross on their necklace.

To start asking for more, build your credibility first with strategic testimonials and a solid portfolio.

Why did Connex for QuickBooks Online succeed? Here are the reasons: I received free app store listings on Intuit’s website. My app was even on the first page of their store briefly. This drove large amounts of traffic to my site. I received free listings on many other sites before they started asking for a commission. I later pulled those listings, since the cost to advertise exceeded the revenue they brought to the company. These stores failed to show how many installs and conversions they generated. I had many positive and real reviews on my app store listings. I noticed competitors had hundreds of five-star reviews that mostly looked fake. QuickBooks Online had few integrations at the time. I was one of the first companies to get listed. For QuickBooks Canada and QuickBooks U.K., my app was one of the first system integrators. I had almost no competitors who serviced QuickBooks outside of the U.S. Shopify, BigCommerce, ShipStation and other companies had no native integration. Mine was one of the first. I recorded videos and added landing pages that ranked high on Google with minimal effort. Since I had a shoestring marketing budget, this was very important. The issue I had with other products was that they didn’t offer free promotion. Since my company was one of the first, we had ample time to add features and fix problems. We have a solution that is light years ahead of competitors. Why would someone want to compete with us? In the words of one of my partner companies, “We could build one, but yours would be a lot better.” My app required no desktop apps or website plugins to install. Since my audience was small business owners, the easier the install the better. Most business users have a limited understanding of websites. Asking them to change a bunch of settings or configure something on their own is daunting. We set up Connex for qualified users. Many competitors just let users go through a self-guided trial. We received feedback from many customers that they would purchase if they could make Connex work. I added a talk-to-sales component, and our conversion ratio increased. Connex was successful because I added a personal touch in a world where SaaS owners expect users to just “figure it out” on their own. Software that requires no support and maintenance is a pipe dream.

you can’t be better than your competitors if you are exactly like them. To be better, you have to first be different.

I asked our business leaders in the depths of the recession to begin working with their suppliers to prepare for the recovery. This seemed impossible to leaders at the time, since many economists and some of my staff were predicting that we’d see an L-shaped recovery—one that was essentially nonexistent. Our sales, according to this view, would never rebound to their prerecession levels. I insisted that recovery would come, just as it always had in the past. And when it did, our short-cycle businesses had to make sure they were first in line for supplies. Our leaders began these conversations, working with suppliers up front to lock in first priority over our competitors when the recovery came. This represented independent thinking on our part—our competitors weren’t doing this. We also took the opportunity to negotiate better payment terms, price reductions, and long-term deals, which were all easier to obtain during a recession. As a result of this effort, we got a big lift as the economy improved, outpacing our competitors in our sales growth, to the delight of our investors.

Step 6: When Filofax grew enormously in the 1980s as an expensive, aspirational product, the absence of a generic niche description became a problem for the leader. People began to use ‘filofax’ to describe the category, which meant that every competitor could describe their product as a filofax (note the lower case f ). In 1986 David Collischon wisely coined the term ‘personal organiser’ to describe the category and encouraged everyone to use the term. Marketing experts are adamant that it is easier for us to think first about a category generally, and then about the brand. ‘I need a personal organiser to keep all my bits of paper.What brand should I ask for in the shop? Well, Filofax is the best known.’ This is an easier and more natural way of thinking than, ‘I need a Filofax.’ The clear benefit of a personal organiser was that it helped people be better organised . If the term ‘personal organiser’ had not gained widespread currency the benefit of the new category would have been much less clear, and Filofax’s brand name would have become devalued. Contrast the confusion caused in the electronic-organiser niche. When this developed in the 1990s, the leading brand was PalmPilot. But what was the category name? As Al and Laura Ries comment, ‘Some people call the Palm an electronic organiser. Others call the Palm a handheld computer. And still others, a PDA (personal digital assistant). All of these names are too long and complicated. They lack the clarity and simplicity a good category name should possess. If . . . a personal computer that fits on your lap is called a laptop computer, then the logical name for a computer that fits in the palm of your hand is a palm computer . . . Of course, Palm Computer pre-empted Palm as a brand name, leaving a nascent industry struggling to find an appropriate generic name . . . Palm Computer should have been just as concerned with choosing an appropriate generic name as it was in choosing an appropriate brand name.’9

What’s a LAN?” Viona asked. Darryl scoffed. Patiently, Owen explained to the novice, “It’s a gaming meet thing. Competitors link up on a ‘local area network’ together.” “So there’s no lag,” Darryl chimed in. Viona felt too silly to ask what a LAG was.

Yeah, but Marcus, aren’t you afraid you’ve now introduced them to the competition?” If you’re thinking this, let’s be clear about something: If someone wants to know who your competitors are, roughly, how long will it take them to figure it out? Seconds, if they’re slow! The reality is this: Consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy.

first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier

In absorbing competitors, Rockefeller was equally secretive and asked them to continue operating under their original names and not divulge their Standard Oil ownership.