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.
I think any company should compete on the quality of their products, their prices, the novelty they can produce, their services, because that would be fair competition.
Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself
If I only had two dollars left I would spend one dollar on PR.
If the employees come first, then they're happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It's not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.
Too many companies are running their business into the ground, I would argue, by being myopically short-term focused on the shareholder.
When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate.
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