Having written my previous post, I think it’s important to say that knowing your competitor is still important after knowing yourself. As you understand you resource pool and how you can serve your customer better, you can start appreciating why some strategies work better than others. Your competitors’ actions or execution failures become an excellent resource for you.
So what is a good competitor analysis really about? It is more about firstly defining the market properly and figuring out how much of your competitor’s business really competes with you. Then there’s the historical lessons of that competitor that you can learnt from.
Finally, focus back on the customer and how they perceive and view various substitutes or alternative where your products and services are concerned. That’s the true current status of “competition” then consider how you can develop strategies to get more of the relevant customer groups’ mind and wallet share.
I’ve done countless competitor analysis in my career. I think about strategy intently when it comes to business, career, life and that works its way into my coaching and consulting career. Most businesses are obsessed with what their competitors are doing.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Sun Tze
The quote is probably well remembered especially by people who have a chinese upbringing. But we often take for granted the part about knowing yourself. In fact, the original chinese saying has it in reverse from the above translation. It starts with “know yourself”. Of course we know ourselves, you’d think.
Yet countless businesses whom I’ve worked with when performing competitor analysis are not thinking about themselves enough. They are just identifying random brands or companies doing the same activities as themselves and considering them as competitors, trying to find out their pricing and what they do. If you know yourself then you know where is your stronghold and which is your true battleground. If you know you’re weak, then focus on where you can garner resources; more often in blue oceans rather than red ones.
When Barnes & Noble started their online bookstore, Jeff Bezos rallied the young Amazon team who was trembling in fear by telling them that there was no point focusing on their competitor since B&N wasn’t going to write them cheques, better to focus on the customers. Jeff Bezos knows Amazon well; there was no way a small upstart can win by mimicking their competitors. They’d run out of breathe before they start if they’re on the same race.
Of course, Amazon was afraid. B&N had lots of resources to try crushing them. But if Amazon was obsessed with this fear they’d be running in circles. The greatest competitor they need to analyse is themselves, their ability to focus on the client base will set them apart from each version of themselves.
I was going through a security check and the security officer saw that my bag had fork, spoon and chopsticks. They were from my portable dinning cutlery set. The officer was amused and asked me to remove it from my bag to check. He then realised it was more for sustainability and that I was not some homeless dude lumbering around.
Lots of disposable cutlery can be saved from bringing your own cutlery set around. That reduces material waste. But at the same time, what we eat matters too!
Cutting down on meats especially beef reduces significant amount of carbon emissions and also animal waste. The globalised world has more diversity in diets so that helps to disperse demand for different food products but the way food is produced had become a lot more industrialised and intense in those particular areas where crops and livestock are produced. This means more logistics, centralisation of profits and inequality.
If you were to make a choice to change your cutlery use or your diet, I’d prefer you think more about your diet.
If your boss disagrees with you, he can do the work his way. But would he? He can argue however he wants but if you’re the one who will do the work, you win the argument.
Likewise you can have a friendly discussion with friends about various business ideas and they could have concerns about your ideas that are well-meaning. But eventually you’ll be the one to test out the hypothesis. Of course, if they try to test it for you and confront you with the results, you should be heeding them.
The conclusion is the same, that you win the argument eventually when you do the work; not by being right.
For those who are already beginning to be overwhelmed by the year, I’d like to confess I’m experiencing the same. There is so much to do, to accomplish and to change or improve. There’s work, family, relationships and the work on myself as well. It seems that I need them all right now! How do we prioritise this all?
Often we want to snap our fingers and have the world as we like it. We fantasise about how the world should be and the changes we could or should make. And then we stop there, frozen simultaneously by the possibilities and the overwhelming amount of work it entails. We then go back into fantasy world and imagine more work to be done instead of doing them.
We then make excuses why the world is fine to be as it is, because we want to get back to doing our own thing, to be in our comfortable patterns. It’s strange how we never fantasise about the status quo and dwell on what it takes to keep things the way they are. But we instinctively resist change, and stop ourselves from making them. So despite the sense of overwhelm, most things are likely going to stay the same.
Better to be selective and careful about the areas we target to change, and then punch hard in those areas. Hit the targets or decide it’s not worthwhile and then go on to the next.
Barely 10 hours before we were slated to meet for a trek, they messaged, “Had a late night today and just got home so we’ll sleep in and skip the trek tomorrow”. We learnt from young to steer our lives using excuses in order to align it with our periodic whims and fancies, but also to ensure we stay on course in our long-term goals when we find ourselves inconsistent. So they are a double-edged sword depending on how you wield it.
Using excuses that comes out of trying to steer towards long-term goals such as having a policy of sleeping 7.5 hours each night, not signing petitions, eating low-carb, etc can be great. And at times, you might just need to give yourself some wriggle room from low-stake commitments.
But the kind of excuses you need to catch yourself on, is when you’re bailing yourself out of the future you were committing to create for yourself or others. Especially so out of whims and fancies. When you make excuses not to do the work, or to deplete the trust people have in you, or to belittle the cultivation of small positive habits.
What is the difference between taking an ineffective action and inaction? I think most people think they are the same and in fact they’d rather take no action to save the costs of the ineffective action.
But I beg to differ. How did you know the action you’re about to undertake is an ineffective action? What are the factors driving effectiveness? In taking the action, do you not discover something new? If nothing changed on the situation, did anything change in terms of your knowledge and capabilities?
We tend to think more in terms of how we change a situation rather than change ourselves. But perhaps the change that we need in ourselves is way more pressing than the situation.
I believe that incentives drives behaviours. That is why big bureacracies are bound to retain mediocre individuals and repel talents. It is why high-paying jobs attract more people even if they are soul-sucking. It is also why high-impact but mediocre-paying jobs like teaching and nursing have people leaving in droves.
But incentives can also be volatile because market signals in the short term may not be a good reflection of fundamentals. That’s why people end up behaving in sub-optimal ways in pursuit of short-term gains. This could involve forging qualifications, attempting to get an increment from attending some third rate data analytics course, etc.
Can we trust incentives alone to govern our societies? Probably not. Because our purpose is greater than just responding to sticks and carrots. So more important to identify what purpose we want to fulfill and allow that to drive us forward. Blind pursuit of incentives bring us nowhere.
For a while now, I’ve had a career newsletter which allowed you to download the Dream, Think & Act! ebook I’ve written. And that’s all about creating the marketing funnel etc. Now I think perhaps it works better as well if more people could access it without having to surrender email addresses to me. Though you could still subscribe if you decided my ideas are useful – I don’t write very often and it’s usually just 4-6 times a year.
Thank you for giving me the attention and time to read through my random musings and nuggets of thought this year. Please do share my materials more broadly and tell more people about my materials.
For the new year of 2023, I’m putting up my ebook free. And it gets better, the original version that was being circulated around was a pdf. Now you can get it as ebooks which you can read on kindle or your favourite ebook readers. Download Dream, Think & Act! ebook (mobi and epub versions) here.
We’ve reached the last day of the year! And while we are counting, this is the 728th consecutive post I’ve written daily. Two more days and officially, I’ve been writing daily for two years. It’s amazing how this habit has kept up and ideas never quite run out once you keep going at it. I probably repeat myself but never quite as much as I’d expect myself to. The act of creating a practice that aligns with one’s interest and passion provides the fuel to keep things going.
2023 is going to be exciting from the perspective of my blogging because it is the year I’ll reach my 1000th consecutive post. There are also further interesting ongoing that may materialise in 2023. My coaching practice slowed in terms of taking on clients and growing my work because I’ve been busy working with my team at Enea Consulting to build on our bolder vision of Blunomy. The website isn’t fully fleshed out it – it looks more like the beginnings of a manifesto.
Through the year, I’ve been trying to work on a second self-published book but in the process, I’ve become way more critical of my writing and story-telling. I realised that the ideas I’ve been working on are not well fleshed out yet to be ready in a coherent collection of writings in a book. So that project is going to be on hold for a while until I develop more clarity. Maybe it’ll spring up in 2023, so stay tuned.
