It is widely accepted that after their defeat in World War II, the Japanese were the first to embrace the ideal of ‘business is war’. This means that business uses the ideas of the battlefield and applies them to the world of business.
And it certainly worked for Japan: today, Japan is a major or dominant power in almost every world strategic industry including finance, communications, mass-transit, semi-conductors, motor vehicles, and popular entertainment.
The world’s largest banks are all Japanese. The largest record company in America is Japanese, and two of the three biggest movie / entertainment companies in America are Japanese. Many big companies in the US like Loews Theatres, Firestone Tires and 7/11 stores are also Japanese. In fact, 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world are Japanese.
Furthermore, Japan today is the world’s biggest manufacturer of cars, having surpassed the United States in the mid 1980’s. These all used to be American dominated industries 25 years ago.
Believe it or not, this phenomenal success can be traced back to ancient China, in particular a great military general named Sun Tzu. It is reckoned that he lived from around 544 BC to 496 BC in the ancient state of Ch’i.
Sun Tzu wrote the earliest – and still the most revered – military strategy book in the world. This masterpiece is best known to most of us as ‘The Art of War’ and can be found on the shelves of most good bookshops. Since naming a written work after its author was customary in ancient China, the text was originally referred to as simply ‘Sun Tzu’.
Considering the countless texts lost or destroyed throughout China’s history, the remarkable survival and relevancy of Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ to this very day attest to its immeasurable value.
This fact was not lost on the Japanese. Sun Tzu was first introduced to Japan as early as 400 A.D. Japan’s leaders earnestly applied Sun Tzu to warfare: the samurai would peruse its contents before each battle. They were among the most diligent practitioners of the book’s concepts, and came up with their own term to encapsulate its meaning: Sonshi.
I’m sure your business would like to one day be the same size as your average keiretsu (almost all the significant companies in Japan are aligned into one of about 6 keiretsu or business ‘groupings’. These are loosely linked ‘super-corporations’ for lack of a better term. Most of the Japanese companies whose brands we know and love are in these keiretsus. Several of these keiretsus have been around a very long time (before WWII) dating back to feudal-like family-run trading houses. Mitsubishi and Mitsui are two of the more famous ones. Famous companies like Nissan, Toshiba, and Sumitomo Bank are all in keiretsus). If you want to win your own war, then you need to look at your business strategy.
The word ‘strategy’ is used a lot and when there is a particularly big problem, then organisations will say that they are drawing up a ‘detailed strategy’ in order to deal with it. In reality, however, strategies should never be detailed: a strategy should be simple, it’s the way that the objectives of the strategy are achieved – the tactics – that are usually the complicated and imaginative part.
Strategy is almost always long-term planning. It involves all those things which you’ll need to worry about for a long time. Formulating your strategy must have as its final goal your total and unquestionable ‘victory’. If not, then the strategy is incomplete.
With this ultimate goal in mind, you must ask yourself the question: “What stands in my way?”
From this, your plan should be simple and flexible enough to encompass most probable outcomes (possible alliances, definite enemies, highly contested and less contested territories, etc) and lead you to victory. This plan, in brief, is your strategy.
Wednesday 17 September 2008
Thursday 4 September 2008
How To Set The Business Agenda
We often hear the phrase bandied about to ‘set the agenda’ for certain issues. These are usually issues that you what you want to be debated, a debate which, as an authority figure, you can lead!
If you can be seen as an authority figure on certain issues, then the ability to set an agenda can be a powerful business tool.
The term ‘agenda-setting’ was first used in a study by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw published in 1972. In the study, the researchers interviewed 100 undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and asked them what issues they were most concerned about in the coming (1968) election.
After determining the five issues the voters deemed most important, the researchers evaluated the media serving Chapel Hill (both print and broadcast) for the content of their stories. McCombs and Shaw found an almost perfect correlation between the types of stories that were covered most often and the voters’ concern for the same issues.
McCombs and Shaw’s research into agenda-setting was not the first foray into the subject (although it was the first to coin the term ‘agenda setting’), and it would not be the last. Several studies are done each year within the various disciplines of agenda-setting research.
Generally, the studies seem mostly to confirm that agenda-setting does in fact take place, and that media attention toward stories is the most important factor involved in shaping the public’s view of the stories’ relative importance.
In fact, studies have shown that the mere number of times a story is repeated in the news will affect peoples’ perception of the story’s importance, regardless of what is said about the topic.
There are three types of agenda: the media agenda (print and broadcast), the public agenda (what the ‘word on the street’ is), and the policy agenda (usually to do with government policies). Each one tends to affect the other, but the media agenda undoubtedly wields the most power when trying to drum up a debate.
But if you think agenda-setting is achieved simply by getting stories in the media, then, I’m afraid, you’ll have to think again, and this is due in no small part to the US Presidential Election of 1940. This is when the academics Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet conducted the first full-scale investigation of the effects of political mass communication.
Their research was originally based on the simplistic ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media influence, where it was assumed that a message would be transmitted from the mass media to a ‘mass audience’, who would absorb the message, like an arm would absorb whatever was pumped into it by a hypodermic needle.
However, their investigations suggested that media effects were minimal, that the idea of a ‘mass audience’ was inadequate and misguided because social influences had a major effect on the process of opinion formation and sharply limited the media’s effect.
The study concluded that only 5% of people changed their voting behaviour as a result of media messages! Their exposure to election broadcasts turned out to be a relatively poor predictor of their voting behaviour, particularly when compared with other factors such as their communication with friends, union members, business colleagues and the political tradition they had grown up in.
No ‘opinion leader’ is an opinion leader in all aspects of life. For example, the car mechanic in your local pub may not use the media much at all because he’s always working late. Nevertheless, he knows a lot about cars and so what the rest of those in the pub ‘know’ from the media about different makes of car will be influenced by his views.
This was recognized by the Nazi party in its gradual rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s. Nazi agitation and propaganda became increasingly successful at forcing themselves onto the front pages of newspapers, thus becoming an everyday topic of conversation. They were particularly keen to capitalise on that attention, directing it in the right direction through influencing the leading members of the various small associations which were spread throughout German communities.
Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed. In the relatively homogeneous villages in Schleswig-Holstein, where feelings about the ‘Weimar system’ were running high on account of the agrarian crisis, the push from one or two farmers’ leaders could result in a local landslide to the Nazi Party.
You should never underestimate the importance of gaining credible, heavyweight endorsement from opinion leaders, and getting them to add their weight to media agenda-setting.
If you can be seen as an authority figure on certain issues, then the ability to set an agenda can be a powerful business tool.
The term ‘agenda-setting’ was first used in a study by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw published in 1972. In the study, the researchers interviewed 100 undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and asked them what issues they were most concerned about in the coming (1968) election.
After determining the five issues the voters deemed most important, the researchers evaluated the media serving Chapel Hill (both print and broadcast) for the content of their stories. McCombs and Shaw found an almost perfect correlation between the types of stories that were covered most often and the voters’ concern for the same issues.
McCombs and Shaw’s research into agenda-setting was not the first foray into the subject (although it was the first to coin the term ‘agenda setting’), and it would not be the last. Several studies are done each year within the various disciplines of agenda-setting research.
Generally, the studies seem mostly to confirm that agenda-setting does in fact take place, and that media attention toward stories is the most important factor involved in shaping the public’s view of the stories’ relative importance.
In fact, studies have shown that the mere number of times a story is repeated in the news will affect peoples’ perception of the story’s importance, regardless of what is said about the topic.
There are three types of agenda: the media agenda (print and broadcast), the public agenda (what the ‘word on the street’ is), and the policy agenda (usually to do with government policies). Each one tends to affect the other, but the media agenda undoubtedly wields the most power when trying to drum up a debate.
But if you think agenda-setting is achieved simply by getting stories in the media, then, I’m afraid, you’ll have to think again, and this is due in no small part to the US Presidential Election of 1940. This is when the academics Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet conducted the first full-scale investigation of the effects of political mass communication.
Their research was originally based on the simplistic ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media influence, where it was assumed that a message would be transmitted from the mass media to a ‘mass audience’, who would absorb the message, like an arm would absorb whatever was pumped into it by a hypodermic needle.
However, their investigations suggested that media effects were minimal, that the idea of a ‘mass audience’ was inadequate and misguided because social influences had a major effect on the process of opinion formation and sharply limited the media’s effect.
The study concluded that only 5% of people changed their voting behaviour as a result of media messages! Their exposure to election broadcasts turned out to be a relatively poor predictor of their voting behaviour, particularly when compared with other factors such as their communication with friends, union members, business colleagues and the political tradition they had grown up in.
No ‘opinion leader’ is an opinion leader in all aspects of life. For example, the car mechanic in your local pub may not use the media much at all because he’s always working late. Nevertheless, he knows a lot about cars and so what the rest of those in the pub ‘know’ from the media about different makes of car will be influenced by his views.
This was recognized by the Nazi party in its gradual rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s. Nazi agitation and propaganda became increasingly successful at forcing themselves onto the front pages of newspapers, thus becoming an everyday topic of conversation. They were particularly keen to capitalise on that attention, directing it in the right direction through influencing the leading members of the various small associations which were spread throughout German communities.
Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed. In the relatively homogeneous villages in Schleswig-Holstein, where feelings about the ‘Weimar system’ were running high on account of the agrarian crisis, the push from one or two farmers’ leaders could result in a local landslide to the Nazi Party.
You should never underestimate the importance of gaining credible, heavyweight endorsement from opinion leaders, and getting them to add their weight to media agenda-setting.
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