Drucker said, "If you look back over the past 40 years at major asset changes, you will find that all changes have occurred outside of existing markets, products, or technologies. Regardless of the industry, executives must focus their efforts on studying what is happening outside the company."
What? If executives don't care about the company and instead look outside the industry, then why do I hire them? We are in the building materials business, which has its own particularities. Our executives should become industry experts and study industry changes rather than looking at other industries. Does he want to switch jobs? That's neglecting one's duty. This is a typical thought of many bosses.
I encountered this during training. A company in the ceramic building materials industry insisted on hiring trainers specifically from the ceramic building materials sector to teach them how to sell building materials. I generally decline such orders and inform them that I have summarized sales channel management models suitable for various industries. I, Hao Zhiqiang, position myself in courses that suit multiple industries. However, such bosses often refuse to acknowledge this and won't invite me to give lectures.
These bosses believe their industries are very special. For this reason, I wrote an article titled "Don't Tell Me You're Special." Executives are classic knowledge workers; they must be highly skilled at learning and summarizing. They should learn from other industries, summarize their own company's experiences, and connect these with systems or processes to continuously internalize them within the company. Good input leads to good output; the higher the quality of the input, the higher the quality of the output. It's hard to imagine what might happen in a closed system or a closed industry. If the ship is sinking and our captain is still swatting flies inside the cabin, does it make sense? Looking outward is the responsibility of our executives.
Take the pager industry as an example. If those bosses only focused on their own industry and didn't see the competition from substitutes, especially changes in the mobile phone industry, they quickly went out of business. The company that adapted to and followed this change was Bird (BoDa). It successfully transitioned from pagers to mobile phones. In Porter's Five Forces model, there are competitive forces from industry rivals, supplier bargaining power, buyer bargaining power, threat of substitutes, and threat of new entrants. Often, our executives only focus on competition from immediate industry rivals, getting bogged down by daily trivial matters and being stuck in routine affairs, making them competitor-centric. In fact, in China's rapidly changing market, the most frightening changes come from outside the industry.
For instance, the monopoly of iron ore has affected the survival of steel mills more than competition between steel mills themselves. Another example is the monopoly of Gome and Suning in retail, especially in large cities, where this monopoly significantly impacts the sales strategies of home appliance manufacturers in urban areas. Don't we often hear stories in business news about the rivalry between Gome and Suning affecting home appliance manufacturers? Additionally, new market entrants can leverage the lessons of earlier companies and grow more rapidly...