Mark's Headache
It is Sunday night, 11:48 pm, and Mark is still tossing
and turning, couldn't fall asleep. The board meeting
is in less than 9 hours. Recalling the slick Power Point
charts, his stomach was all in knots. "Where is
the growth?" His focus blurs, as he ponders on
the single digit growth numbers being projected for
the next 5 years. The overall North America market is
shrinking. Reflecting on more than 10 years of the company's
history, his confidence is faltering. "Where can
we grow?"…
Tony's Black Box time bomb
"What if my customers find out?" Tony was
fighting his sweat from coming down. His anguish is
clearly showing. Holding the two very identical looking
"black box" in his hand, he wonders how long
before his customers would discover what he just did,
that these two boxes function basically the same. One
sells for $70, another one at $15. Unfortunately, the
one sells for $75 is made by his company and the other
one is made in Taiwan. "How am I going to compete
with this?"
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John's Unmoving Success
John is an experienced international marketing manager
who had a fabulous track record in his previous hi-tech
company's European division. He is now heading up this
start-up company with cutting edge technology. He makes
his first trip to Japan, which obviously is the largest
market in this part of the world.
As usual, he brought his high impact presentations
which clearly showed all the advantages of using his
product. The presentation went very well, with all managers
in the Japanese company nodding their heads and John
heard them saying yes many times. The trip was considered
a success.
Three months past, six months past, things were still
unmoving… When asked, the Japanese side would say
"We need more time to study". John was getting
desperate. His investors and boards are asking John
to show more revenue growth, and he doesn't know how
to unstuck the Japan story. "What went wrong?"
he thought.
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