Not long ago, I heard this piece of advice from Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and one of China’s richest man: “Don’t be the best. Be the first!” This advice is very profound. But it is also very counterintuitive and goes against the grain of conventional wisdom that we have learnt since we were children. If you want to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive world, you have to be a contrarian. Conventional wisdom will not work anymore.
Tag Archives: competition
How did Robert Kiyosaki avoid becoming a commodity? Part 2: Raise prices!?!?
In my previous article, I wrote about how Robert Kiyosaki was stumped with a seemingly unsolvable business problem—his product was perceived as a commodity and he couldn’t compete on price profitably. So, how did he solve this intractable problem? The only way out was to stop targeting the product at the low-end, where the cheap customers were, […]
How did Robert Kiyosaki avoid becoming a commodity? Part 1: Stumped!
In 1996, Robert Kiyosaki was preparing his Cashflow game for final production, ready for commercial use, when he encountered a very serious business problem. The question was, how much would someone pay for that product? The first problem he faced was that the product might look too much like a game for entertainment rather than […]