Globalizer

   F1 is an exciting sport because the racing teams show us real hi-technology and competition strategy, but F1 is also boring because most teams can only follow the few leading teams during the racing. when we put F1 and company management together, we found there are many similiar things among them.

  1) core competency is the No. 1: for F1, the racing car is the most important. one famous F1 player has said that you can only follow till the game end if you are behind in the match. we can see how important the car's performance is! how can one racing team makes a better car than others? innovation is the key. for a company, if it wants to be the industry leader, it also should innovate product, technology, service, business model etc. therefore, the whole company is just like a best F1 racing car. any other rivals can't easily exceed and only be the followers.

  2) right competition strategy: stop strategy is the most exciting part when watching F1. all the activities are very precise. if the strategy goes wrong, all the efforts are wasted. what's more, the team leader should monitor the racing progress to real-timely adjust the strategy to cope with the accidents. in the business competition, it's same. company executives make right strategies to gain market, high profit return to shareholders and good reward to employees. if they are lazy monitoring market change, they can't fine tune the strategy to do the right things. but catching the market change is far more difficult than F1. company needs to be patient and insistent.

  3) perfect team working: F1 is a typical teamwork sport. the perfect collaboration between the player, the technical team and supplier partners embodies the teamwork beauty. if companies can learn the essence from F1 teams, the right strategy can be carried out right. but it's really a hard part for most companies, especially international companies.

  4) outstanding executives: Schumi, Alonso, Kimi are the indisputable most outstanding F1 players. because of them, their cars' performance can be displayed thoroughly. but don't forget their partners like Massa, etc. their sacrifice and coordination guarantee workmates' success. so are the company executive team. CEO is just like Schmi, other directors are like Massa. they should work closely to lead company to success. but interesting thing in F1 is Schumi still can't easily exceed Button if Button runs ahead and the car is good. this remind me that normally a good CEO can't guarantee company's success and designing core competency is the key to succeed. after all, most outstanding talents are very few and the wisdom gap with most people is not very obvious.

  oh, I almost forget one point—the policy. everyone can remember F1 official team modified the rules several times to contain Ferrari's advantages. so if a company performs too excellent in one market, the local government perhaps will regulate this company to balance. I hope company executives don't ignore it!

   Many people have used google maps to look for the place they want to go. since craiglist.com is popular in the world, many web service providers begin to combine google maps with classified information. they can provide visualized information to give users better experience. unfortunately, no one wants to provide map function for business usage at current. I think managers will benefit from the simple and visual maps which integrated with business information. let me try to pave the way for interested readers.

   firstly, we should think about which business information is suitable to be showed on maps. map turns 3D images into 2D, turns monotonous text into vivid picture and reduces the huge world into a small window. so I think maps can excellently show the market information, business environment, company internal information.

  now, we can roughly design our business maps. just like porter's five forces theory, I think there are 5 things which managers should monitor at any time: customer, competitor, partner, human resource and local government policy. so if we can make a map for each, that will greatly help managers make decision. customer map: I believe more and more companies are using CRM software to manage your customers. if we can take CRM output as the input of customer map, company executives will be happy to look at this map because they can easily find out their customer world distribution, company business deals progress and current market share etc. competitor map: everytime company get their competitors' information, someone is reponsible to input the information into the map database. then the map will change the color or size or else to show the competitors' impact on the company. therefore, company executives can get a straight picture on their rivals not the boring texts which they should waste their brain to think over. partner map: company can mark different partner type using different format on the map. then managers easily understand what kind of partners they need in a particular market from the map display. further more, effects can be added to display partnership performance, etc. human resource map: if a company is an international company, the map can be more useful to show whether HR strategy is matching with corporate strategy and the manpower in some market is too many or shortage. this map also has an alternative manifestation: the map can show what kind of talents have good quality in some region. for example, if overall there is no suitable IT/computer talents in one region, maybe it's not the ideal outsourcing place or company should deploy talents from other areas if company really want to do outsourcing business in that region. government policy map: it's more suitable to be called weather map. local government policy decides a company's business behavior. if policy is advantageous, the map shows sunny color; if not, the map is cloudy or rainy. interesting, right?

    although we figure out the map items and can begin to make these useful business maps, please remind 3 important preconditions: precise business information, realtime update and good map design. otherwise, the business maps are useless and negative. 

    I hope we will see this kind of application soon. technology often simplifies complex business.