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内容：Nicole Lee 编辑：Nicole Lee
Wechat ID: NativeStudy / Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
Part I: Speaker
'The Economy Is Slipping': China's Slowdown Hits Former Boomtown
ROB SCHMITZ | May 21, 2019
He Qiang should be manning his convenience store, but today he's collecting tiny green berries along the road and shooting them at birds with his slingshot. The 26-year-old is distracting himself from his worries. He spent all his savings — the equivalent of $35,000 — on a store that no longer has any customers.
He bought the store a year ago after hearing the economy of Hechuan, this city of more than a million people just outside the metropolis of Chongqing in southwest-central China, was booming. Automobile factories in Hechuan employed thousands of people who churned out SUVs for China's consumer class.
"My shop did well for a month after I moved here," says He, taking aim at a bird atop a tree. "But then, everyone left. Now, they're all gone. Every day, more people leave."
Assembly lines have shut down, workers have left, and Hechuan's streets, shops and many residents' pocketbooks are now empty. He's convenience store is still open, but hardly anybody buys anything, so he's taken another job next door as a fast food deliveryman. He says he rarely has to work because the restaurant is usually empty. It pays the equivalent of $500 a month.
……
Source: NPR
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/21/724946510/the-economy-is-slipping-china-s-slowdown-hits-former-boomtown
[Rephrase 1, 6’39’’]
Part II: Speed
Revolution in B2B retail: from perfume to platform economy
David Dubois | May 20, 2019
[Time 2]
The brand behind the brands. For 65 years, that’s the business premise of luxury goods distributor Bluebell as it brought Western brands including Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo into Asian markets. It was a trailblazing business model that has helped the company, which traces its roots to a parfumerie in Cannes, notch up annual revenue of US$1.5 billion.
But, like other B2B companies founded generations before the internet came into being, Bluebell was increasingly at risk of becoming marginalised in the digital economy. Game changers on three sides of the business - brand, consumer and market - have converged to erode the core competitiveness of B2B firms.
To stay ahead of the game, Bluebell - in many ways exemplary of B2B actors facing similar challenges caused by digitisation - is transforming itself to adapt to the digital disruption and pave the way for the industry. My new case study, Transforming Luxury Distribution in Asia: Bluebell’s Makeover in the Face of Digital Disruption, co-authored with Frederic Godart and Jean Wee, charts how the family-owned firm turned its business model upside-down to tackle digital disruption. Its experience offers lessons on how B2B firms in general could respond to the game changers.
[201 words]
[Time 3]
Rethinking B2B value proposition in the digital age
Those challenges are now familiar to many companies. Brands can easily access and analyse unprecedented granular information about consumer preferences and trends while reaching out to customers directly through platforms such as social media and search engines. Sales increasingly take place online rather than in physical stores. Traditional B2B intermediaries like Bluebell can no longer leverage their grasp of market information and customer data.
Consumers, likewise, are bypassing intermediaries. People share knowledge or opinions about products among themselves, weakening the impact of brand messaging or advertising campaigns. Online influencers who have anything from a few hundred to a few million followers are increasingly the purveyors of luxury.
Further pressure comes from the market, in the form of new actors. Private equity groups rival companies like Bluebell as a source of funding for brands. E-commerce players like Alibaba open brick-and-mortar stores and squeeze the middleman. Large groups like LVMH acquire smaller brands that could have potentially engaged the services of a conduit like Bluebell to enter and operate in markets.
Faced with such disruptions, B2B companies need to formulate and operate their transformations along two lines of thinking:
[199 words]
[Time 4]
Stand up: Recreate advantages by beefing up the brand; become a content or solution provider, rather than just a service provider. Bluebell, for instance, launched its in-house Bluebell Retail Academy in 2016 to train brand partners’ frontline staff.
A similar approach in the IT sector led Intel to create a content-first strategy as early as 2015. The microchip processor maker tasked their internal analytics unit with facilitating social selling and supporting the B2B sales force. This content-first approach blurs the frontiers between B2B and B2C and brings Intel new business opportunities involving technologies such as artificial intelligence and drones. Examples include drone-led fireworks - a US$2 billion market - and drones that monitor production and crops for wine makers. Intel’s strategy demonstrates vertical value creation which helps firms regain market share and influence by remonetising the brand.
Lean in: Engage the marketplace by designing platforms and building communities. Squeezed between customers who have an increasing amount of information, and producers who have wider and easier access to the market, B2B companies need to think about reclaiming their competitive advantage by emulating the giants of the platform economy such as Uber and Airbnb. A platform need not be fully fledged; it can be small and experimental.
[205 words]
[Time 5]
Take, for example, Accent Group, a major distributor and retailer of footwear brands including Timberland and Sketchers in Australia and New Zealand. Five years ago, the group created an online shop for The Athlete’s Foot brand, for which it was the franchisor with about 100 franchisees. Initially, the franchisees were resistant to the e-commerce website as they saw it as a competitor to their businesses, but their attitude changed after Accent tweaked the model so that all orders were fulfilled by franchisees’ shops. Accent’s move is an example of horizontal value creation through which firms regain market centrality by (re)creating links among disparate actors around industry-specific skills and expertise.
Accent has since embarked on a successful, group-wide digital transformation that has seen post-tax net profit surge to a record US$47.1 million in 2018.
Aim high, start small
The greater complexity, formality and longer-term nature of B2B businesses means any digital transformation firms undergo would be more difficult than that of B2C companies. Here are a few suggestions on how to make it work:
Don’t change overnight. Introduce the digital culture into the organisation slowly and progressively. Firms can start by having weekly conferences where online influencers are invited to meet executives or bringing in digital experts and slowly integrating them into the organisation. Such first steps can help to demystify “digital” and foster acceptance of disruption with a long-term perspective.
[230 words]
[Time 6]
Have a champion. Ideally, the CEO. My advice to participants of INSEAD’s executive seminars is: If the CEO is not 100 percent convinced that digital disruption demands a shift in thinking - and budget - coupled with a profound transformation of the company, change the CEO (of course, I also point out how participants can help their CEO to change). Bluebell’s Ashley Micklewright epitomises a CEO who is spearheading a B2B company’s digitalisation drive.
Winners in the digital world are companies that see themselves as learning agents. Firms should learn and take what works for them from the digital model, especially the platform economy, by starting with small scale experiments, then slowly building their way up. Obviously, all firms are not going to turn into Amazon overnight, but elements of the platform economy can certainly add value to their business. Sometimes the experiment will fail, but it's also good to understand why something doesn't work.
From reassessing their value to customers, building their own content, to creating platforms and communities, B2B players can take advantage of successive waves of new digital tools and gradually transform themselves to stay relevant in increasingly competitive markets.
[212 words]
Source: Management-issues
https://www.management-issues.com/opinion/7347/revolution-in-b2b-retail-from-perfume-to-platform-economy/
Part III: Obstacle
How firms can avoid the mediocrity trap
Manfred Kets De Vries | May 6, 2019
[Paragraph 7]
Steve Jobs once noted: “A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players… A+ players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B-grade work.”
XYZ Company had a vacancy for a new sales director. In due course, only two candidates remained. Given the company’s ambitious expansion programme, most interviewers were convinced that the much better choice was Alex. But to everyone’s surprise, the hiring VP selected Zane, despite his objectively weaker track record.
As the social scientist (and humourist) Leo Rosten said: “First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.” Of course, individuals are much more complex than this statement suggests. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that A-players are a firm’s top performers; B-players its average worker bees; and C-players those tagging along for the ride.
In real life, many B-players indeed fail to hire the best people, generally out of insecurity. On some level, they fear being outperformed or even replaced. The less confident they are about their own level of competence, the more threatened they feel.
B-players may also be subject to the "deadly sin" of envy, a ubiquitous behaviour pattern that explains many vindictive actions. Envy can sometimes be a positive motivating force. But more often than not, feelings of inadequacy and inferiority may trigger resentment and unhappiness. This, in turn, can lead to a conscious or unconscious desire to hurt the envied person, as a way to right the perceived wrong.
A false sense of security
Managers who are emotionally insecure or who have a fragile self-esteem regularly face a dilemma when making hiring decisions: Should they hire someone better than them or a less competent person who might make them look better by comparison? In their defence, B-players may simply fail to recognise A-players. Or they may suspect (without proof) that the most qualified applicants won’t commit to the organisation. It doesn’t help that some A-players can come across as arrogant and rub B-players the wrong way.
Whatever the reason, managers with poor judgment often get away with it, despite the harm done to their organisations. As the “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy said: “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”
At the XYZ Company, it didn’t take very long to discover that Zane wasn’t up to par. Given his limited knowledge of new sales techniques, he was unable to respond to the challenges posed by the competition. Although the VP tried to attribute his chosen candidate’s poor performance to external factors, his own reputation took a beating. Ironically, had he had the courage to hire someone more capable than himself, his own job would have been more secure.
Eventually, as the company’s market position deteriorated, the CEO had no choice but to step in and fire both the VP and his protégé. She knew from experience that hiring the wrong people was the surest way to destroy a company. Following this incident, she made talent management a corporate priority.
Striking a balance
Meanwhile, many A-players recognise the benefits of hiring and working with other A-players. In fact, concern for their own careers can motivate them to develop others’ paths. They understand that organisations full of talented people will offer them room for growth.
Of course, no company can have only A-players. The bell curve tells us that, in most organisations, reasonably competent B-players will make up the majority of the workforce. To be clear, not all B-players are insecure and at risk of making terrible hiring decisions. Moreover, having too many ambitious A-players could also create a Darwinian organisational culture. Ideally, there should be a balance between high-flying As and steadfast Bs.
It is important to recognise that there are no A-, B- or C-players without context. It is every firm’s challenge to create the context where people can be their best. Given the right learning opportunities, people can go through a remarkable transformation. Some people may be ranked as B-players simply because they are less attention-seeking than A-players or because they don’t disguise their preference for a more balanced lifestyle. Then again, some B- or C-players are just in the wrong job or company. In a different position or organisation, their talent could shine through.
Fighting an insidious process
The question remains, how can organisations avoid embarking on a slow, downward spiral, given that a good proportion of its managers will be B-players, many of whom could be emotionally unprepared to hire better people? The stakes are high: Once there are too many mediocre people in a workplace, its climate deteriorates. As professionalism and productivity slide, the best people feel marginalised and leave. By the time profits decline and alarm bells start ringing, it is often too late to halt the organisational decline.
Steering clear of the mediocrity trap may lie in paying considerable attention to unconscious psychodynamic processes involved in hiring decisions. If we make an analogy with dating - and hiring and dating do have a lot in common - both entail complex and mistake-prone decision making. When hiring or dating, we would do well to acknowledge that unconscious biases exist. Selecting candidates based on a gut feeling is not good enough. Much more is needed to be able to identify and hire the right people.
Other recommendations include:
Have organisational discussions about (unconscious) biases and the steps that could minimise their negative effects.
Ensure the diversity of the selection committee in terms of age, race, gender, experience and education. This is an effective way to reduce biases and avoid groupthink, provided its members are truly given a voice.
Use well-crafted job specifications that clearly define the skills, capabilities and experience required for the position.
A somewhat standardised hiring protocol should complement unstructured interviews and include an assessment of the candidate’s cultural fit.
It is better to delay a hire than to accept a lower-quality candidate who will take a long time to come up to par or, worse still, self-destruct. In the absence of consensus, it is wiser to keep searching.
The former auto exec Lee Iacocca once said, “I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.” Everyone with hiring responsibilities should adopt this mantra. While successfully transcending our inner demons of insecurity and envy may not be an easy task, it is the only smart thing to do.
[1097 words]
Source: Management-Issues
https://www.management-issues.com/opinion/7346/how-firms-can-avoid-the-mediocrity-trap/
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发表于 2019-5-22 02:16:26
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