Tao Te Ching and Wuwei Management

Chapter 10 3 "Your teacher": Enterprises must learn to "bring the doctrine"

Innovation is "creative imitation", and only by learning from the predecessors can we surpass the predecessors.

Don't value your teachers, don't love their resources, even if you are deluded by your wisdom, this is called cleverness. —— "Tao Te Ching" Chapter 27
Not respecting his teacher, not cherishing his reference, although he thinks he is smart, it is actually a great confusion.This is really a profound truth.That is to say, entrepreneurs must know how to take outstanding people as teachers and learn from others.

Benchmarking management means that in order to improve its own competitiveness, an enterprise takes an excellent enterprise in the same industry and field as a benchmark, learns from it, finds a breakthrough for improvement, sets up the goal of learning and catching up, and collects, compares, analyzes, and tracks A series of standardized procedures such as learning, redesigning and implementing.In layman's terms, benchmarking thinking is "bringing doctrine", that is, using other stones to change one's own jade.Many large enterprises at home and abroad have begun to pay attention to this kind of management technology and thinking mode.

Nike learned from Reebok back then, and now Nike has become a strong player; Pepsi learned from Coca-Cola, and now the two Coke companies monopolize the market side by side;Walton once said: "In fact, everything I do is learned from elsewhere."

China's current market competition environment is full of bloody storms and vertical and horizontal alliances. Enterprises have entered the Warring States Period and are facing increasing competitive pressure.How to win in the fierce market competition?How to improve self-competitiveness in the competition?Obviously, benchmarking is a good and easy way.Learning from competitors and the strong can move to the forefront of competition at low cost and high efficiency, narrow the gap in competition, and become the winner of competition.Of course, as entrepreneurs and managers, we must first make self-innovation breakthroughs, practice benchmarking thinking, and constantly integrate and share various resources to enhance the comprehensive competitiveness of enterprises.

The growth process of the Samsung Group is a typical example of the use of benchmarking thinking.

In 2006, Samsung's stock soared to $699 per share. The company's market value exceeded $1000 billion for the first time, more than twice that of Sony, the famous Japanese electronics giant. Sony's current market value is only $410 billion.For the first time in South Korea, Samsung has become one of the most valuable companies in the Asian market.

As a dark horse in the global consumer electronics field, Samsung's growth has not been smooth sailing.

When the company was first established, it produced counterfeit products, many of which were based on products from famous Japanese electronics companies. In 1970, Samsung was still working for Sanyo in Japan, making cheap 12-inch black and white TVs.Yet by 1978, Samsung was the world's largest maker of black-and-white televisions. In 1979, it formed a partnership with Sharp Corporation, another Japanese electronics company, to produce microwave ovens. In 1986, Samsung was able to export products not only to Japan, but also to Europe and the United States.By this time, it had become the world's largest manufacturer of microwave ovens.By 1990, Samsung ranked 16th among the world's semiconductor manufacturers with the 13MDRAM chip it developed.

After several years of technology imitation, Samsung realized that the only way to progress was from technology follower to technology leader, and this could only be done by innovating in every field it was in.As a result, Samsung began to emphasize change and innovation.President Li Jianxi even personally asked engineers from Japanese and American companies for advice on some technical details.

After more than 30 years of accumulation, Samsung has changed from an ugly duckling to a veritable white swan.Today's Samsung is not only a world-class multinational company, but also has achieved the myth of "King of Change".

What did Samsung start with?It is to constantly learn from the strong, so as to make yourself a strong one.Through imitation, Samsung internalizes competitors' methods and experience as resources for the company's own development, thereby surpassing competitors in the shortest possible time.China is now the center of the world's manufacturing industry, but we have relatively few core technologies. Our companies have to work for multinational companies, but entrepreneurs must be aware that our goal is by no means to be a follower forever. The strong is the benchmark, because we will also become the strong!Be the benchmark for others!It is based on such considerations that Lenovo Group proposed the development path of "trade, industry and technology" in the early stage of development. Taking the strong as the benchmark is the general law for the success of the weak.After all, the top companies are individual. For most companies, finding their own benchmark is setting an example for themselves, thus providing a lasting impetus for the development of the company.

Dangdang.com, a well-known domestic website, also achieved success by learning from others:

Yu Yu, the co-president of Dangdang Online Bookstore, made no secret of imitating and learning from Amazon, the world's largest and most famous online bookstore.She said: "I am more familiar with Amazon's financial statements than some Wall Street analysts. I will use Dangdang's indicators to compare with it. The latest result is that among the nine indicators, we only have inventory turnover. It." Yu Yu compared Dangdang to a "preschool child", while "Amazon" has entered "adolescence".She said: "There is an old Chinese saying, 'Threesomes must have my teacher', 'choose the one who is good and follow it'. Dangdang despises being a student, because some learning is better than no learning."

Only by learning from the strong can we become strong.But as a strong one, we can't relax, because big companies have problems with big companies, especially bureaucratization. Big companies should also learn from small companies, learn about their high efficiency, their decision-making methods, and how they adapt to the market.

Benchmark thinking enlightens us that learning from the strong and the successful can greatly reduce our learning costs and make the innovation process less detours.Taking the experience of the strong as a benchmark, and imitating and transferring this experience to the operation and management of your own enterprise will greatly improve the efficiency of the enterprise.

Only by seeing the virtuous and thinking of the same can we carry on the past and open up the future.Undoubtedly, for any enterprise, it is necessary to learn from others, to "bring the doctrine", to learn from other people's experience and strengths, so as to improve self-performance and achieve self-transcendence.

(End of this chapter)