The path to enlightenment and profit starts inside the office
5 October, 2016 / Articles
Competition used to be easy. That is in theory, if not always in practice. Until recently, most competent companies had a clear idea of who their rivals were, how to compete and on what field to fight.
One of the starkest — and scariest — declarations of competitive intent came from Komatsu, the Japanese construction equipment manufacturer, in the 1970s. As employees trooped into work they would walk over doormats exhorting: “Kill Caterpillar!”. Companies benchmarked their operations and market share against their competitors to see where they stood.
But that strategic clarity has blurred in so many industries today to the point of near-invisibility thanks to the digital revolution and globalisation. Flying blind, companies seem happier to cut costs and buy back their shares than to invest purposefully for the future. Take the European telecommunications sector. Not long ago most telecoms companies were national monopolies with little, or no, competition. Today, it is hard to predict where the next threat is going to erupt.
WhatsApp, the California-based messaging service, was founded in 2009 and only registered in most companies’ consciousness when it was acquired by Facebook for more than $19bn in 2014. Yet in its short life WhatsApp has taken huge bites out of the lucrative text messaging markets. Today, WhatsApp has close to 1bn users sending 30bn messages a day. The global SMS text messaging market is just 20bn a day.
Car manufacturers are rapidly wising up to the threat posed by new generation tech firms, such as Tesla, Google and Uber, all intent on developing “apps on wheels”. Chinese and Indian companies, little heard of a few years ago, are bouncing out of their own markets to emerge as bold global competitors.
As the driving force of capitalism, competition gives companies a purpose, a mission and a sense of direction. But how can companies compete in such a shape-shifting environment? There are perhaps two (partial) answers.
The first is to do everything to understand the technological changes that are transforming the world, to identify the threats and opportunities early.
Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT, the British telecoms group, says one of the functions of corporate leaders is to scan the horizon as never before. “As a CEO you have to be on the bridge looking outwards, looking for signs that something is happening, trying to anticipate it before it becomes a danger.”
To that end, BT has opened innovation “scouting teams” in Silicon Valley and Israel, and tech partnerships with universities in China, the US, Abu Dhabi, India and the UK.
But even if you foresee the danger, it does not mean you can deal with it. After all, Kodak invented the first digital camera but failed to exploit the technology. The incentive structures of many companies are to minimise risk rather than maximise opportunity. Innovation is often a young company’s game.
The second answer is that companies must look as intensively inwards as they do outwards. Well-managed companies enjoy many advantages: strong brands, masses of consumer data, valuable historic data sets, networks of smart people and easy access to capital. But what is often lacking is the ambition that marks out the new tech companies, their ability to innovate rapidly and their extraordinary connection with consumers. In that sense, the main competition of so many established companies lies within their own organisations.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, constantly urges his employees to keep being radical. In his Founders’ Letter of 2013, he warned that companies tend to grow comfortable doing what they have always done and only ever make incremental change. “This … leads to irrelevance over time,” he wrote.
Google operates a 70/20/10 rule where employees are encouraged to spend 70 per cent of their time on their core business, 20 per cent on working with another team and 10 per cent on moonshots. How many traditional companies focus so much on radical ventures?
Vishal Sikka, chief executive of the Indian IT group Infosys, says that internal constraints can often be far more damaging than external threats. “The traditional definition of competition is irrelevant. We are increasingly competing against ourselves,” he says.
Quoting Siddhartha by the German writer Hermann Hesse, Mr Sikka argues that companies remain the masters of their own salvation whatever the market pressures: “Knowledge can be communicated. Wisdom cannot.” He adds: “Every company has to find its own unique wisdom.”
The science man and innovator, Fernando Fischmann, founder of Crystal Lagoons, recommends this article.
