Читать книгу Gamechangers - Fisk Peter - Страница 11

In Hong Kong there is a great 100 year-old business that explains our future potential. For much of the last century Li and Fung was focused on low-cost manufacturing of textiles. That was until salary levels grew, and places like Indonesia were able to achieve much lower cost bases. The business reinvented itself as a virtual resource network, helping brands to find the right partners for the business, in terms of expertize, quality and price.

Walk into a Li and Fung office in Sao Paulo or Istanbul, Barcelona or Toronto – or any one of their 300 offices in over 50 countries – and the small team of sourcing experts will help you find the best designers, manufacturers and distributors for your brand. Every pair of Levi jeans you buy is made with the help of Li and Fung, and around 40 % of the world's textiles. If you need finance, they'll find you an investor, and if you need merchandising, processing or customer service they can find the right partner for that too. Their business model can be based on fees, on commissions, or on an agreed mix.

Actually, all you need is a good idea. Take it to Li and Fung and they can make it happen with you.

Those ideas are not the product of years of experience, of big organizations with thousands of employees, of rigorous ‘big data' analysis and scientific labs. Those things can help, but they can also hinder. Fresh perspectives beat conventional wisdom, youthful insights connect with millennial markets, right brain intuition is an equal to left brain intelligence, and collaboration can achieve this even better.

And we haven't even started on Steve Jobs. From the revolutionary Apple Mac that transformed computing. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. Not just incredible products with beautiful designs, but new business models creating entirely new markets, changing the world.

Or James Dyson, with his bagless vacuum cleaner. Ratan Tata, with his dramatically affordable Nano car. Amancio Ortega with his ready baked Zara clothes. Or further back in time … Henry Ford, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso, The Beatles, Nicolas Hayek, Ted Turner and many more.

Great ideas are the result of better thinking.

We need to think – to see things differently, and do different things – to open our minds to new possibilities, to outthink the new competition.

• Think bigger.. redefine the markets we are in, reframe our brands in more useful contexts, recreate the strategies for success.

• Think smarter.. refocus on the best customers and categories, reinvent every aspect of our business, realigning with new partners.

• Think faster.. reenergize people with new ideas, resonate with customers' new priorities and aspirations, and achieve more together.

Beyond the connectivity and applications, the social networks and artificial intelligence, we now live in a world that is more equal and accessible, where people are more knowledgeable and capable, than ever before.

It really is a world limited only by our imaginations.

Back at the moonshot factory of Google X, they have a mantra which says ‘Why try to be only 10 % better, when you could be 10 times better?'

Ten times better provides much more than a temporary competitive advantage, it has sufficient capacity to change the game. The effort required to think in a bigger frame, to innovate things more radically, to deliver them faster, is relatively small compared to the benefits.

But that requires one more thing. To think different.

Apple, or rather its ad agency Chiat Day, conjured up that phrase, but it matters more than ever. The best companies today don't just play the game, they think bigger and better, smarter and faster, in order to change the game.