Preventing Timesheet Fraud Strategies for Ensuring Accuracy and Compliance
Competition lecture
1. Competition and Firm Strategy
Chuck Eesley
Morgenthaler Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor
Stanford University
Management Science & Engineering
School of Engineering
cee@stanford.edu
How to be a Monopoly 101
(building a company Warren
Buffett would invest in)
12. Examples
• Moutai vs. Tsingdao
• Sina Weibo QQ Tencent
• Ebay Alibaba
• Shanghai Jahwa vs. P&G
• Baidu Google
• Whirlpool Qingdao Haier
• Hanergy Traditional Energy - solar overcapacity
• Guangxi Wuzhou Zhongheng Group vs. Pharma firms
• YY vs. Google Hangouts
• BYD?
• Apple vs. Xiaomi
– Brand vs. low-cost
13. Traditional View
• Porter’s Five Forces
• Long-term, durable competitive advantage
• Manufacturing-based
• Efficiency-based investments in manufacturing
• Use of capital – quote about profits being all
the inventory/equipment vs. cash
18. Barriers to Entry/Growth
• In markets without barriers, competition is
intense!
• Loss of traditional sources of competitive
advantage
– Low cost labor
– Protected markets
– Government ties (anti-corruption campaign)
19. Sources of Competitive Advantage
Monopoly
• Government ties (关系)
• Cost advantage (Chinese manufacturing)
• Regulations (Energy, Pharma)
• Capital intensive industry
• Brand (Coca-Cola)
• Network effects (Microsoft Office)
– 2-sided networks (Ebay, Facebook, Google, Media
companies)
20. • It is better to buy a wonderful business at a
fair price than a fair business at a wonderful
price.
– Warren Buffett
21. Categories
• Demand competitive advantages
– Unequal access to customers
– Customer captivity
– Search costs
– Switching costs
– Government support/protection
• Cost (supply) competitive advantages
– Superior technology
– Patents
– Larger scale + declining marginal costs
– Special access to information
22. Competition with Barriers to Entry?
• With barriers to entry is life necessarily all good?
– Airlines
– Automobiles
– Banking
• Avoiding competition that leaves every
participant worse off is an especially enlightened
choice – one that deserves to be called
“strategic”.
23. Sketch of current macro-economic
situation
• Export/import deficits
• Chinese over-capacity in manufacturing
• US over-spending
25. New View
• Series of short-term competitive advantages
– Could be based on technology, but not necessary
• All strategy is local
– Focus on Niche-markets – difficult to dominate global
markets
• Services-based, retail – focus on one geography
– Wal-mart, Grocery stores, Universities
• Manufacturing-based – focus on one niche product
– Cannot dominate global automobiles in general
– Intel – only chips
– Nokia Apple Xiaomi?
26. Sources of competition
• Domestic competitors, same industry
– Former employees
• Foreign low-cost competition (Africa)
• Neighboring industry competitors (TV/Radio)
• New industry competitors
– AT&T VOIP
– Hotels Airbnb
– Taxi Uber
– Newspapers/TV Social Media)
27. Adjacent markets
• Perilous to chase growth across borders
• Dominate a set of discrete, contiguous
markets, expand only at the edges
• Example of over-expansion Wal-Mart
29. How to get from here to there?
(Tactics)
• New market, same product
• New product, same market
• Not a bad idea to date before marriage
– Internal venturing (intra-preneurship)
– Corporate Venture Capital
– Joint Venture
– Alliances
– Investments in VC
– Acquisitions
30. Circle of Competence
• Know the boundaries and push them slowly
• Industry
– Diversification typically hurts performance
• Geography
– Wal-mart, Verizon
• Product
– Apple, Microsoft, Intel
• Mode of entrepreneurship/investment
– If you have no experience with joint ventures or
acquisitions, tread slowly with the first few
33. The Intangible Element
• Strategy must be executed faithfully
• This is why company culture is so important
• It is also difficult to change
34. Trust
• The highest form that civilization can reach is
a seamless web of deserved trust – not much
procedure, just totally reliable people
correctly trusting one another… In your own
life what you want is a seamless web of
deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage
contract has forty-seven pages, I suggest you
not enter.”
– Charlie Munger (Wesco Financial annual meeting,
2008)
35. Joint Venture
• Reduces risk on both sides
• Has been common for Chinese firms with
foreign companies (experience)
– Step below an acquisition
– Step above an alliance
• Other party must bring something to the table
• Rotating leadership works best
36. Alliances
• Both parties have to bring something to the
table
• Another form of dating before marriage
37. VC investments
• Great way to learn about technologies/new
markets
• Beware: most VC firms lose money (only the
top 25% make money)
• Can be a better idea than CVC
– More independence
– Might not wind up strategically related
38. Acquisitions
• Goal – but tricky to do well
• Only buy businesses whose value you
understand.
• Buy businesses for less than they are worth.
39. Acquisitions
• On average acquisitions destroy value for the acquiring
firm
• Beware:
– Paying a premium for “synergy”
– Thrill of an acquisition/enhanced size
– Paying in stock - "buyer sells part of itself to acquire seller"
• More successful when:
– Within circle of competence - Related industry
– Experience with acquisitions
– Business can raise prices easily and has a high return on
capital
– Target is either left alone or thoughtfully integrated
40. Conglomerates that work?
• (1) Berkshire would be a diffuse conglomerate, averse only to activities about
which it could not make useful predictions.
• (2) Its top company would do almost all business through separately
incorporated subsidiaries whose CEOs would operate with very extreme
autonomy.
• (3) There would be almost nothing at conglomerate headquarters except a
tiny office suite containing a Chairman, a CFO, and a few assistants who
mostly helped the CFO with auditing, internal control, etc.
• (4) Berkshire subsidiaries would always prominently include casualty
insurers. Those insurers as a group would be expected to produce, in due
course, dependable underwriting gains while also producing substantial
“float” (from unpaid insurance liabilities) for investment.
• (5) There would be no significant system-wide personnel system, stock
option system, other incentive system, retirement system, or the like,
because the subsidiaries would have their own systems, often different.
• (6) Berkshire’s Chairman would reserve only a few activities for himself.
– Then names several activities that Buffett does, mostly limited to managing
investments, a lot of reading, and CEO replacements when necessary.
41. • (7) New subsidiaries would usually be bought with cash, not newly issued stock.
• (8) Berkshire would not pay dividends so long as more than one dollar of market value for
shareholders was being created by each dollar of retained earnings.
• (9) In buying a new subsidiary, Berkshire would seek to pay a fair price for a good business
that the Chairman could pretty well understand. Berkshire would also want a good CEO in
place, one expected to remain for a long time and to manage well without need for help from
headquarters.
• (10) In choosing CEOs of subsidiaries, Berkshire would try to secure trustworthiness, skill,
energy, and love for the business and circumstances the CEO was in.
• (11) As an important matter of preferred conduct, Berkshire would almost never sell a
subsidiary.
• (12) Berkshire would almost never transfer a subsidiary’s CEO to another unrelated
subsidiary.
• (13) Berkshire would never force the CEO of a subsidiary to retire on account of mere age.
• (14) Berkshire would have little debt outstanding as it tried to maintain (i) virtually perfect
creditworthiness under all conditions and (ii) easy availability of cash and credit for
deployment in times presenting unusual opportunities.
• (15) Berkshire would always be user-friendly to a prospective seller of a large business. An
offer of such a business would get prompt attention. No one but the Chairman and one or
two others at Berkshire would ever know about the offer if it did not lead to a transaction.
And they would never tell outsiders about it.
43. Example: MOOCs and Universities
• MOOCs as potential disruptive technology
• What is the source of the competitive
advantage/moat in academia?
– Is this threatened by MOOCs?
• Christensen vs. Porter
• Debate: Disrupt your own business or use tech
to extend your competitive advantage?
44. Beware the Institutional Imperative
• Analogous to Newton’s first law of motion
• An institution (e.g. a business) will resist any
change to its current direction
– Innovation is a dirty term in organizations
• Behavior of peer companies will be mindlessly
imitated
• Corporate projects will materialize to soak up
time (just as work expands to fill available
time)
45. What to avoid
• Institutional Imperative
• Purportedly strategic moves
– Acquiring companies
– Entering other markets
– Lowering price (by reducing margins)
– Pet projects (risky R&D)
– First mover advantage
– Everyone else is doing it…
46. Framework
• What business is worth being in?
– Monopoly, not commodity (what is the source of
the moat?)
• What price is worth paying to be in that
business?
47. • Claim:
China would be better off copying Berkshire
Hathaway than copying Silicon Valley.
- Charlie Munger (Warran Buffett’s business
partner)
- Is this true?
50. Outline – what we covered
• Excellent businesses
• Strategy
• Moats
• Circle of Competence
• Practical tactics
• Beware the Institutional Imperative
• Values
51. • Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.
- Charlie Munger, USC commencement
speech, 2007
52. Competition and Firm Strategy
Chuck Eesley
Morgenthaler Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor
Stanford University
Management Science & Engineering
School of Engineering
cee@stanford.edu
How to be a Monopoly 101
(building a company Warren
Buffett would invest in)