Doing the plan P to P1 (to create bright spots), P2 (to prevent weaknesses), and P3 (to take care of the current situation) can ensure that we survive. Choosing the industry we are most familiar with as the target and strengthening the ability we are best at is the best choice for ordinary small and medium-sized enterprises to do in order to survive. But the current market competition is so fierce, in the current battlefield, our strength is not big enough, it is difficult to get ahead, so it is not enough to live now, but also to find hope for the future. Where is your early day? Like Google's subversion of Yahoo, Apple's subversion of Nokia, and Gree's subversion of Chunlan, it is very difficult to overturn the boss in your current field. What to do?
In order to survive, we have to gain a firm foothold in the industry we are most familiar with at present, but if there are already supergiants in this field, and the giants have scale advantages, you don't; The giants have abundant capital, and you can't make ends meet; Giant resources, channels, and connections are far better than you, you do the same thing, what is the chance to win? The current existing industry is just the scraps in other people's rice bowls. Don't say that small businesses have little hope, even if large enterprises want to grab it, it will be difficult to turn around after all.
For example, in 2014, Wanda also wanted to do e-commerce, pulled up and Tencent, known as Teng million, vowed to invest 20 billion in 5 years, and after two years, there was no result, and all three withdrew. This is a typical example of insisting on stealing other people's jobs. Another example is how Microsoft can't beat Google in the search field; Gome can't beat Ali in the field. Birds can fly down from the air at high speed and land steadily on the branches, which is impossible for humans to do anyway. Every company has its own genes, that is, what it is good at and what it is not good at. Entrepreneurs should not look at the success of others in other fields, so they also cross borders to imitate others. Britain defeated the Qing Dynasty not because it wrote better Bagu Wen and made better pen, ink, paper, and inkstone, but because it made guns. In the future, the way that Made in China will surpass Made in Germany is not to make what Germany can do better than Germany, but to do a lot of things that Germany will not do and cannot do. The direction of surpassing Microsoft in the future is not to develop a better operating system, and it will definitely not be because of making a better WeChat in the future. This world is very rich, there is no need to stumble in other people's strong fields, entrepreneurs should open up new fields and become strong in new fields. The opportunities left for the mobility of ordinary people are not in the old industry of stock games, but in the new field of incremental games.
25] The first advantage of entrepreneurs: foresight.
The results of the survey are as follows, and foresight is the first to set the direction.
Inferior managers are doing yesterday's things, ordinary managers are doing today's things, and excellent managers are doing tomorrow's things, one step foreseeing, step by step. The following is Lei Jun's own statement to help us understand what foresight is.
In order to compete with Microsoft Office, Lei Jun and his colleagues spent three years developing the office software "Pangu", which was released in 1996 and sold miserably. The company was in trouble and almost couldn't even pay its salaries. In the desktop Internet and Microsoft competition, there is no hope of winning at all, Lei Jun suffered the first heavy blow in his life. Lei Jun left Jinshan to reflect and understood a truth: the weak should not compete with each other in the field where competitors already have advantages, others have a first-mover advantage, who calls themselves late! So what is the place where you have a first-mover advantage? It's an area of the future that no one has yet touched.
Later, Lei Jun saw the Internet boom coming, so he founded Excellence.com, but it was still unsuccessful. Later, Lei Jun had a hunch that the scale of the mobile Internet would be even larger in the future, and in 2005 he became the first batch of real users and the earliest participants in this wave. When Microsoft and a whole host of competitors arrived a few years later, he had already prepared his ammunition and was ready to go, but Microsoft was lagging behind.
It just so happened that at that time, I had just started working, and I was also exposed to the 2G Internet, and when I experienced it, the speed was so slow, I felt that this thing really had no future; As soon as Lei Jun came into contact, he felt that this thing really had a future. Shame on you! That's vision.
After Lei Jun succeeded, he said a humble word, saying that he had hit the wind. Don't take this sentence seriously, it reverses the relationship between internal and external causes. The reason for his success is 20 years of accumulation in the IT industry + 3 years ahead of schedule, rather than encountering the tuyere by chance. When the wind picks up, even if the leopard runs over, it's too late, it's just a humility.
Whenever a new trend comes, only a small number of people have a foresight, and most people do not feel it. The change of trend determines the key to the success or failure of an enterprise, and whoever has the first insight into the key changes of things will be the winner. It's like the sails have just peeked a little out at sea level. What really determines the fate of a person's life is only a few moments, and only a very few people can be captured, which is the meaning of the word "collar" of leaders and leaders. No large enterprise emerges in a calm and certain situation, and it seizes the opportunity to stand up in the midst of uncertainty. Sitting in the office and giving orders, that is only a superior, not worthy of being a leader.
26] Lay out the future.
After the enterprise has passed the survival period, the subsequent goal is development. Enterprises can't put all their strength into the current products, otherwise what will you sell next year and the year after? For products that have already heated up, it is no longer a good opportunity, and you have to be desperately prepared to enter. Because everyone else has been preparing for 3-5 years or even longer to wait for the opportunity to come, why can you compete with others as soon as you enter? There are many ways to reduce dimensionality, such as next-generation technology reserves, innovative business models, bidding, etc., the essence of which is a "early" word, starting ahead of others. When we were in school, we all knew that Lu Xun carved the word "early" on the desk, everyone is equal in front of time, so the dimensionality reduction blow in time is the biggest blow, and opportunities only favor those who are prepared.
Many companies don't have a three-year plan, as if they don't want to work until next year. The company should have a short-term plan of at least 3 years, so that you can give employees a short-term plan for 3 years. GE has a basic R&D department that researches technologies in 5 years, and a product development department that makes products that will be on the market in 1-2 years. Yu Feng, President of Honeywell China, said: Honeywell is also considering a 3-5 year strategy, and there is a group of people to discuss external opportunities and capabilities for 3 months every year, and constantly revise the direction to meet the needs of the future market and customers. HP does strategic planning for the next 5 years every year, and updates it every year, and each update takes at least 5 days, which is not counting the time for preparation and post-factation. Generally, the layout of ordinary enterprises in the next three years will appear in the direction is very good, and the cash flow of small enterprises cannot support the layout for too long. You don't have to worry, the road to success is not crowded, because most people can't bear to wait 3 years of loneliness. When he can't see the immediate benefits, he procrastinates; When you see the immediate benefits, you panic, this idiom is called gain and loss. P4 (long-term) There's plenty of time for you to prepare, what are you doing? The sooner you prepare, the more you don't panic.
Of course, everything is easier said than done. Ordinary people have already done their best to survive, ** and the capital to wait for 3 years? This is the reason why this world is polarized, the richer you are, the more you can invest in the future, and when the opportunity comes, the initial windfall profits are taken away by the rich people who laid out in advance, and the latecomers can only drink a sip of soup. The less money he has, the more he can't invest in the future, anxiety has occupied all his mind, and he has no idea of investing in the future and laying out the long-term plan, and his energy and physical strength are all focused on earning the food and clothing of the day, otherwise he will be hungry. How to break this vicious circle? To be honest, there is no way, if anyone can figure out how to crack it, then they will win the Nobel Prize. Buddha Shakyamuni said that only by going to the world of bliss can we get rid of the sea of suffering in the world. I don't have any good way to help the poor achieve class leapfrogging, you have to make the feasibility of the goal and plan P's P1 (to create bright spots), P2 (to prevent weaknesses), and P3 (to take care of the present) all in place, and then to achieve P4 (to take a long-term view). That is, to seek survival first, and then to seek development. Sima Qian wrote in "Historical Records. A sentence in the "Biography of the Goods Colony" can be called a wise saying to the poor: "It is to have no wealth to do it, and there is little wit, and it is a great scripture when it is forgiving." The meaning is: when you don't have money, you can only make money by the simplest effort. Bit by bit, capital is accumulated out of poverty. When you accumulate to a certain extent, you can rely on your intelligence to make money, prepare in advance, wait for the time to come, and gather greater wealth.
Therefore, ordinary people should not be in a hurry to take shortcuts, shortcuts in society are traps laid by others, cutting the leeks of people with strong desires. Save the money that can be spent or not on tobacco and alcohol, online shopping, pets, travel, makeup, cars, KTV, etc., accumulate funds through diligence and simplicity, accumulate ability through work and study, and accumulate contacts through kindness. Time is the greatest advantage of young people, and if it takes ten years to accumulate, there is naturally hope. If you are old and have some savings in your hand, at least you can not panic. After all, China is still developing, and as long as the economy still has its metabolism ups and downs, both the poor and the rich will have opportunities. Don't listen to people who lie flat and say that there is no hope for the current era, how the class is solidified, this is unambitious.
Don't let the sadness of the times become the sadness of your life.
27] Choosing a future niche.
In fact, for the layout of the future, this thing is not uncommon, but any large enterprise must do this. What we want to discuss is how ordinary enterprises can lay out the future.
Historians have a statistic that only 6 of the 30 major battles (including 280 local wars) from ancient Greece to World War II were won on the frontal battlefield, and the rest were won in a roundabout way. The same goes for economic warfare, in the famous business theory "Positioning": "It is much better not to attack the market leader head-on, it is much better to go around the obstacle than to go through it, and it is better to choose a position that is not fully occupied by others." "Only by avoiding the real can we win, Lei Jun said, "Who calls yourself late". How to avoid the current "real" and lay out the future "virtual"? Let's start by looking at how nature is laid out.
Ecology is the law of survival in nature. The law is as follows: if a population competes with another stronger population for the same niche, it will eventually become extinct. In order to survive, the weak must go to a new niche and maintain dislocation competition with the strong. Each population has its own ecological niche, and direct competition between populations is avoided, thus ensuring the stability of the community. There are hundreds of millions of species on the planet, but they can still live together because each species has its own ecological niche. The History of the Development of Biological Thought describes this biological law as follows: In many cases, success is simply due to becoming different or more different, which reduces competition.
From large organizations to small individuals, they all follow the natural laws of survival. Large enterprises do a big market, small enterprises do a small market, hundreds of billions of enterprises, the project target is at least more than 5 billion market, the following market is not enough for him to live, how can tigers eat flies and mosquitoes? This has left a lot of billions of dollars in the market. If you are in a niche where giants already exist, the best thing to do is to hurry up and find a new niche gap, why do you have to climb to the top of the pyramid and kill you? We are looking for a wide range of visions, but the goal of landing must be specialized. Using this new niche as a base, and my own territory, is the best way for ordinary enterprises to get ahead. The way to survive is in it, and so is the way to succeed.
This new niche of the future should be suitable for your characteristics, so that you can cultivate and become the first. This is the law of business, the first and second market occupants will earn most of the profits, a consumer can only remember five brands for a product, monopoly to the end, at most five manufacturers still have profits. 40% of the attention is on the first brand, 20% is on the second brand, and the rest is more distracted, because the customer has to take risks when buying something, and his best strategy is to follow the crowd and buy the first brand. Therefore, you must find ways to become the first brand in a certain segment in order to obtain the highest profits, not how big (quantity) is in this segment, but how many (quality) you can rank in this field.
For example, if you already have a **sell goods, you want to do another **, there is only a dead end, you can be Zhihu, you only sell knowledge, and become the first. For example, new energy vehicles are very hot, we do charging piles for new energy vehicles, if the charging piles are also fiercely competitive, we will do supporting the inverter, if the inverter is also fiercely competitive, we will do the supporting matching, DC capacitors, if the DC capacitors are also fiercely competitive, we will do the matching of the supporting matching, the membrane inside the capacitor. Always find your niche.
Finally, I would like to give you a philosophical phrase by Cai Zhizhong: The little bird said to the giraffe, although you are very tall, I can fly.
28] Choose the most difficult and slowest path.
Suppose you have passed the survival period now, completed the original capital accumulation, and now you are laying out the future in P4. You currently have a steady cash flow, you have the capital to try and error, and you have another 3 years. Suppose you have set a market segment in the future, and the market explodes after 3 years, you will regret to find that several peers have come out at once, because the peers have also laid out this market segment several years in advance. There is no way, China's market competition is like this, there are too many enterprises, not only the current qualitative competition is fierce, but also the homogeneous competition for the future market segment will be very fierce, and the infantry will always have to encounter a white-knuckle battle. Even if Lei Jun has laid out Xiaomi, he still has to compete with OPPO vivo. Fortunately, everyone is a martial arts master, and they will not fight boxing, and they will focus on their own characteristics from the very beginning, Xiaomi focuses on fan popularity, OPPO focuses on the rear camera to shoot scenery, and vivo focuses on the front camera**.
Human nature is to like to conform to the herd, and the monkey who does not conform to the herd will be eliminated by the lion and tiger as soon as he is single. Unable to pick the fruit at their fingertips, the energy consumed is not replenished, and such monkeys are also eliminated by starvation. Like easy, this is the natural result of millions of years of human evolution, mainly manifested in the mentality of wanting to get rich overnight, everyone knows that there is no free lunch, but they all want to have a free lunch, want to enjoy a relaxed and comfortable life. Just as high school physics says that "the current automatically flows to the branch with the lowest resistance", the human instinct is to choose the easiest way to make money. As long as there is a shortcut, human nature will turn that shortcut into the first choice of life. However, in order to cope with the competition that will inevitably arise in the future, we cannot choose the easy road in the layout stage, but choose the difficult road in the future market segment, slowly gnaw hard bones, and seek competitive advantages in advance for the competition that will inevitably come in 3 years.
Here's the picture: The road below is particularly easy to walk, straight and wide. The road above was rugged and long, full of thorns, and there were jackals, tigers and leopards. The first instinct is to take the following path, and once you see that most people are walking this path, you feel safe and rush to follow the crowd. But don't think that jackals, tigers and leopards are very powerful, the most difficult thing to deal with is people. You will know after a public bidding that there are so many competitors, stalking and fighting, fighting to the top, and fighting with people can be compared to overcoming a technical difficulty and improving by 0The quality of 1 point product is much more difficult! So many people walked the road below, no matter how much fruit there was on the road, it was eaten up by the people who came before them, and the people behind had no fruit to eat. Although the above road is full of obstacles, it may be relatively easy because there are few people and the competitiveness is small. This is exactly what the Jewish wisdom book "The Talmud" says: "The things of the world are very strange, and the more difficult things are, the easier they are to do." The "difficulty" here is not simply difficult, but refers to the "pain" of the user! What is easy to solve is not a pain point, it is precisely because it is difficult to solve, so no one solves it, so it becomes a pain point, and solving the pain point is the biggest need of users. Most people are incapable or determined to solve user pain points, so they will take the initiative to avoid them, and they have been stuck in the initial P1 stage of creating bright spots, and even become a gimmick. But at this time, you have already passed the survival period, and the purpose of creating bright spots in the P1 stage is to survive as soon as possible based on your own advantages; When it comes to the P4 stage, it is necessary to go one step further, start from the needs of customers, directly point to the pain points of users, and spend a lot of time gnawing hard bones. Combining your personal strengths "highlights" with customer needs "pain points" is the best breakthrough in future wars, and concentrate all your remaining forces on this breakthrough. If you don't remember the rest of the book, just remember that and it's enough for a small business to take off.
Therefore, we must choose a path that few people take and choose a difficult road. At this time, what tests us is not competition, but loneliness. In fact, this can also be understood as market re-segmentation, but in "quality" to do re-segmentation. Throughout, the book emphasizes not to compete in "quantity", but in "quality".
I have been in school for 22 years, and I have learned the deepest point: the fastest way to improve my learning ability is not to do a lot of simple problems, but to concentrate on solving a few difficult problems. After finishing school, I worked for another 22 years, and I realized the deepest point: the fastest way to improve my work ability is not to do a lot of simple things, but to concentrate on a few difficult things. It is precisely because of my personal experience that I posted "Take the most difficult and slowest road" on the company's bulletin wall.
If the company does not do difficult things, the company cannot grow, and if individuals do not do difficult things, individuals cannot grow. If you just want to get a high score in the exam, and you can be promoted in your work, and take the fastest and easiest path, then I'm sorry, the way is not the same. I also don't deny the importance of doing simple things repeatedly, I'm purely talking about how to improve ability, the right way in the world is the vicissitudes of life, if you want to excel, there is no easy way to go.
For ordinary people, everyone's time is precious, how to maximize yourself in a limited time? It's about taking the initiative to do the hardest thing. For example, when arranging tasks in the company, take the initiative to choose the difficult ones, take the initiative to solve conflicts when encountering them, and take the initiative to increase yourself when completing indicators. Don't be afraid of failure, even if things fail, but in the process of doing it, your ability has improved, and ability is the key to ensuring your success in life, not face. There is no ability that can be acquired without setbacks. You've experienced times when you don't have money, and you don't spend money when you have money. So the sooner you experience failure, the lower your cost. You can imagine how much progress you have made compared to the colleagues who take the initiative to pick easy to do in the job, hide when encountering contradictions, and set the lower the better, if you continue to exercise like this, and if you continue to exercise like this in a few years.
In the case of our company, for example, the average annual growth rate was about 25% in the first five years of the company's existence. The speed is tepid, the market is declining rapidly, and sales have not been able to find a breakthrough point. We can choose to reduce the price, which is the easiest thing to do, the effect is immediate, and our peers have also chosen to reduce the price. But this is a dead end, because this road is too crowded, everyone uses the same tricks to fight for physical strength, to see who is the first, which is not in line with my business philosophy. We don't fight the best war, because it is easy to reduce prices, and we don't take the easy road of price reduction, so we can only seriously take the road of improving quality, improving service, and innovating and breaking through.
I wanted to do something different and something that I would be proud of when I was old, or I would have failed my God-given life. At that time, there were all kinds of gimmicks in the market, and users couldn't tell who was doing it and who was bragging. I found that the warranty period of peers is generally 1-2 years, and the indicator of high quality is the warranty period, and no one dares to play the characteristics of high-quality long-term warranty. This means that "high-quality long-term warranty" is scarce! According to the basic principles of economics, the scarcer it is, the more valuable it is. As a result, under the condition that our company's on-site defect rate was reduced to 4 per 1,000 (4 sigma), in January 2021, we were the first in the industry to significantly increase the standard warranty period to 5 years, which increased by 60% that year; In April and May 2022, under the unfavorable circumstances of being closed in Shanghai, it continued to grow by about 50% throughout the year, and word of mouth, profit, sales, cash flow, and per capita output value all increased significantly.
In various news reports, I often see such news, a company found an opportunity to invest little and achieve quick results, and the company's products sold well, and became an example for people to envy for a while. This kind of report is highly misleading and runs counter to the basic laws of the market economy. The less investment you make, the faster you get results, which means you have a low barrier to entry. This is true for yourself, and it is also true for your competitors. Such an industry has a low threshold, and there will be vicious competition. One investor said to me, "I don't invest in projects that will be profitable in five years." "I didn't understand it at the time, but now I understand that this is what it means to catch a big fish with a long line. If you want to build an advantage, you must choose an industry with a long learning cycle and difficult technology, and the more difficult it is, the longer it will take, and the higher the threshold for future establishment. Don't be afraid of difficulties, if you don't choose the difficulty in the layout, it will be even more difficult when you compete in the future.
All of us in business hope to develop faster, faster, smoother, and smoother, and I also expect the same. However, doing business cannot pursue superficial speed and superficial prosperity. You must know: if you don't experience the slowness in the front, you can't have the fast in the back, and if you don't solve the difficulties in the front, you can't enjoy the ease in the back. From the abdication of Emperor Xuantong of the Qing Dynasty to the reform and opening up in 1978, our country has undergone earth-shaking changes in just over 60 years; After more than 30 years of reform, there have been earth-shaking changes, and our entire country and nation are doing the most difficult thing. As an entrepreneur in the midst of it, as long as you are alive, don't be afraid of ups and downs.
Here's a summary: strengthen the bright spots and protect the weaknesses; Do a good job in the current and long-term layout. In fact, it is "learning from each other's strengths, looking ahead and looking backwards, both to survive and develop". Being able to punch the target P combination like this is already very methodical. Taking our company as an example, it is only after achieving 80 million sales that we have passed the survival stage before we begin to think about longer-term goals.
This book selects two pairs of contradictions, namely the bright spots and the weak points, the current and the long-term. The balance between the two strategies ensures that there is no rush and no conservatism. When I was a child, I liked Zhao Yun in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Qin Qiong in the Legend of Heroes of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and Yang Zaixing in the Legend of Yue Fei, but I don't understand that if the marshal doesn't go up to fight, what's the use of the marshal? After the operation, I learned that finance should be conservative, sales should be enthusiastic, R&D should be innovative, manufacturing should be rules, and the general manager should be fully weighed. Over the past 40 years or so, many companies have been playing on the offensive side rather than defending, resulting in many companies dying of cash flow disruptions. The latter should be more offensive and defensive balance, and sustainable development is more meaningful than explosive growth.
In the traditional PDCA cycle, P is only a directive, but for the personal development of business management, P is a systematic plan. Because P is the starting point, the subsequent actions follow P, and P cannot be explained clearly without making great efforts. And more importantly, p has to do with cognition the most. In the preface of this book, it is said that the purpose is to let readers establish scientific thinking and cognition, so it takes a lot of space to talk about P, and now the P of the PDCA cycle is finally basically finished. In addition to these two pairs, there are more combinations of dimensions in actual operation, and you can build your own plan according to your actual situation and find the most suitable way for you. For example, online and offline, direct sales and distribution, domestic market and foreign market, high-end market and low-end market, own funds and foreign funds, self-effort and support, standardization and customization, self-research and joint development and purchase of technology, alliance and acquisition, specialization and diversification, etc., are combined into P to achieve dimensionality reduction and attack on competitors. As you get stronger, the more resources you have, the more combinations you have, and the more difficult it will be for your competitors to parry.
Meituan's Wang Xing once played Go with Jiudan Chen Zude, and there was a step down, Wang Xing couldn't play right, and asked Chen Zude what was the reason? "That's because you made a mistake earlier. "We plan the P link well, take the first step at the earliest, and win at the starting line.