Competitive Advantage

Its been a while since the last post. School's busy, and i think i need to rev up my engine more to get back into the right gear. I wonder how i managed to go through 8 hours of sitting in a single position chewing through pages of AFA text book a year ago....

Anyway, I shouldn't be complaining so much as there is some form of synergy in my courses this year. I'm doing 'governance, risk and assurance', 'strategy', 'advanced management acct (AMA)' and 'tax planning' now. The 3 courses have a underlying theme running through them - you've got to understand your business, both at industry level, and at a process level.

The strategy course is taught in the 'case' method, which is an awesome learning experience, but super heavy in terms of course work. No pain no gain i guess.

Did an industry analysis on the airline industry last week and another on the carbonated soft drink industry this week. Its amazing how clearly Porter 5 shows us where does the profit flows to. I was inspired by my case study of Apple to understand IBM better. Read the book "Who say elephant can't dance" and must say that when we see what we learn in the class room applied by someone who did it so well, learning becomes a lot more interesting.

Anyway, during AMA class, our prof told us to apply different strategic analysis tool to ourselves and analyse what we should do with our self.

The SWOT framework works great on individuals too. Listing down my strengths and weakness, i think that i'm not exactly good for nothing, but also not great at anything. Hopefully being good in a few things would one day lead a great thing. Is this a true sustainable competitive advantage? NO, cuz anyone can emulate you with enough hard work. So the key is to constantly improve, learn and grow.

Applying the hedgehog concept, i think we can define what we want to do better.

I hope my self assessment is not too off. But honestly, the best analysis is sometimes futile. Part luck part hard work. Hopefully, it will all payoff one day.

By the way, of the 11 companies that was profiled in Good to Great, Fannie mae has gone under govermental ownership, and Circuit city has gone into liquidation.

We should feel happy when every thing kinda crashes around us, cuz life cannot get much worse after this. The converse is true. It is time to be truly worried when one is riding on a high, cuz mean reversion is ultimately one of the strongest forces.