You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
Interpretation
Study your competitors to improve, but maintain your originality to survive in the market.
This quote emphasizes the importance of learning from your competitors in order to grow and enhance your own strategies, but it warns against the danger of imitation. Copying others not only stifles your own creativity and innovation but can also lead to a lack of identity in a competitive landscape, ultimately threatening your success and sustainability.
In practice
A business seminar focusing on developing unique strategies rather than following market trends.
Hong Kong people say Hong Kong needs to preserve its uniqueness. I say Hong Kong's uniqueness is in its diversity, its tolerance of difference cultures... China does not want to see Hong Kong in decline. I have full confidence in its future.
If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat tons of them.
It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.
Helping doing business easier, we choose the name Alibaba because it is a global company. It is founded in China, but it was created for the world.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
Even if your competitor is still small in size or weak, you should take him seriously and treat him as a giant. Likewise, even if your competitor is massive in size, you shouldn't regard yourself as a weakling.
In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.
Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.
Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth.
Zoom does not focus on revenue goals, but rather we have confidence that focusing on the happiness of existing customers and our employees will organically increase growth.
I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.
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