I expect most of you have heard the old joke about the campers and their encounter with a bear.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
However, on the off-chance you haven’t, the gist of it is that two campers cross paths with a bear. As the angry bear begins charging out of the woods towards them, the first camper starts putting his sneakers on. The other camper screams, “It’s no use, we’ll never be able to outrun the bear!” The first camper yells back, “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you!”
A number of folks use that as a business analogy to say that in most business categories, we need only to beat our competition to survive. I disagree. By thinking about surviving or “outlasting” the competition, the focus is on the short-term (we need to run only as fast as the other guys) rather than building for the long-term. Focusing on the other guys as the standard might just mean you’re being dragged down rather than creating enough of a gap so as to make them non-entities. After all, what is that bear protecting and what kind of opportunity does it present?
The auto industry is a great example. For years, the US car companies built cars that were responses to what the other guy had to offer. The standards of production in terms of fit and finish were OK. It was pretty much a race to stay slightly ahead of one another. Then the Japanese auto invasion hit and suddenly there was a different standard in terms of quality and innovation. It was much higher as measured by independent firms such as J.D. Power. The domestic manufacturers’ share of business dropped quite a bit – imports offered better quality and more car for the money. Because they were focused on outrunning one another rather than the foreign bear, they almost got killed. Had they been focused on an altogether different standard – the one that asks “how can we build something that’s great” who knows what might have been.
Consult Keith 