نطق دوم

Lecture 2:

Listen to part of a lecture in a business management class.

Before the break, david asked a question when planning to start a business or even just to compete more effectively. How important is it to analyze your competitors?

well, it’s extremely important. In particular, you need to try to understand the assumptions that the competition makes. Before you develop your own business strategy. you see, every company makes assumptions.

For example, they may believe they’ve got a terrific sales force when maybe they really don’t. or perhaps they think they’ve got the most innovative technology that’s available. When in fact, there’s something much more advanced out there. but how do you go about identifying a competitors assumptions? well, there are a number of factors you could decide to look at, but i’d like to focus on two really important ones that, in my opinion, are quite frequently ignored. okay? You need to look at your competitors passed its history companies are like people, they respond to events, current events based on their past experience, whether positive or negative.

for example, if a company has always been successful against its competitors, it may assume that it can’t or won’t ever lose those battles. or, and this is a lot more common. If it’s had a significant failure in its past, it may assume that it should never again try to engage in that particular activity.

Clearly, a smart company learns from its mistakes, but companies aren’t always good at recognizing when the business environments changed. they don’t always realize when past experience is no longer a good predictor of future performance.

what else? Oh, yeah. You also need to take an in depth. Look at the leadership of the company. Even the biggest corporations are run by some group of individuals, and their personal experiences will play a large role in establishing the company’s assumptions. managers have histories to their influenced by past successes and failures. Just the way corporations are. those personal histories shape their management assumptions, but it’s not just the past experiences they’ve had at that particular company that influence managers. some managers are hard from other companies rather than being promoted from within. And these outsiders bring new perspectives, which may not fit neatly with the company’s existing assumptions.

We see this a lot, especially if the new managers not coming in with the experiences from the same business sector, but rather from one that operates with very different rules and assumptions, like moving from making automobiles to selling insurance. there’s another reason to study the leadership. we want. we expect Top executives to be generalists. they have to be familiar with all aspects of their businesses. But the reality is that most of them have some specific area of expertise that influences their decision making. for example, um, an executive with a financial background can’t help viewing the world differently from a manager who’s trainings mostly in production. but you can make some pretty good guesses about how their backgrounds may influence their strategic assumptions. if the Top person selects a management team where everyone has the same functional background, well, how hard is it gonna be to determine that team’s assumptions?

okay, let’s imagine that we’ve made a comprehensive list of a competitors assumptions.

Now we need to figure out if those assumptions are accurate. companies treat their assumptions like facts, but they shouldn’t. For example, company a assumes it has highly loyal customers. So it doesn’t worry when company b starts selling similar products at lower prices. since company a is sure its customers are loyal, it decides not to lower its own prices. if it’s assumptions, right? It won’t lose any, or at least not many customers. But if it’s assumptions wrong, well, it could lose a lot of customers before it realizes its mistake. assumptions can create blind spots, situations where the company doesn’t uh, can’t see the whole business picture. with blind spots. A company misses the significance of events or reacts to them too slowly. and of course, identifying your competitors, blind spots can create terrific opportunities for you. and it doesn’t really matter if the blind spot is based on arrogance, meaning the competition overestimates their own strength or under estimates yours, or whether that blind spots something, they’re afraid of where they shy away from making the same error all over again. in either case, if you move aggressively, it’s likely that their response will be too little, too late.

e a cascade of other problems in the human body.