Good Morning edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com,
“I don’t like the idea of competition,” says Tarun Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy, makers of sleek and premium electric scooters.
It’s an odd answer to my question about his favourite mental models or First Principles. We were speaking on the phone earlier this week.
I first met Tarun last December for episode 10 of the First Principles podcast. But before that, he had shared with me four internal blogs he had written on Ather’s evolution for his colleagues. The theme of his posts was “Building a company”. Written between August 2020 and October 2022, the blogs were titled “The Matrix”, “Sales”, “Going Public?”, and “Build”.
They offered me a window into the mind of a young (he was 33, and had started Ather nearly a decade ago) founder-CEO as he worked to proverbially “build an engine while flying the plane”. Tarun came across as intensely First Principles-driven, even for small details most would overlook. He was also a contrarian, prone to doing things that were harder, less obvious, and often risky.
“I don’t like the idea of competition. It’s a terrible idea. Because the way it works is that some competitor launches a product, and your reaction is to compete and do the same thing but better,” he said on Wednesday morning as we spoke.
Instead, he told me, his framework was to double down on your own and innate strengths, instead of fixing weaknesses. “Such a framework forces you to think differently. Because it’s unlikely your competitor is playing a game built around your strengths.”
I ask Tarun for an example.
“In the early days of Ather, as we were trying to figure out what kind of product we wanted to build, it was obvious to me that we shouldn’t solve for our weaknesses. Meaning, we wouldn’t win any battles with rivals who had the largest manufacturing, best distribution, quality (Honda has been working on quality for decades), or price (the Hero group are the hardest negotiators). Instead, we decided to build the largest R&D setup and focus on product. While everyone else thinks automobiles is about scale, we focused on product,” he says.
“Focusing on product may look commonplace in 2023, but in 2013 it was hard to sell, even to investors,” he adds.
It takes a lot of conviction as a leader to resist the urge to respond to competition. We live in an era where every other day, a product is branded “disruptive”, “game changing” and “definitive”. From journalists to employees to investors, everyone wants to know how a company will respond to a rival’s move.
But responding means taking the bait. Like Tarun says, it's rarely that a competitor launches a salvo where the rules of the game allow you to play to your strengths. Instead, the rules are defined around the competitor’s strengths.
Playing to your strengths isn’t just about companies, but individuals too. Sadly, much of corporate career development and appraisal formats are devised around identifying the things that you are not good at, and then presenting them back to you at the end of a year so you can “work on your gaps”. Few conversations are about playing back the things that you’re good at, and helping you do more tasks that play to those strengths.
This is also the premise behind the long-running Gallup assessment called CliftonStrengths (formerly called Clifton StrengthsFinder).
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