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Cedric Chin Profile
Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

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Publishes https://t.co/jDXGXZVHqH. Tweets about books & the art of business, from the perspective of an operator. https://t.co/8gO6sUlhUM

Singapore & Saigon
Joined March 2008
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
4 years
1/ I recently finished digging into a body of work around extracted tacit mental models of business expertise, and it is wild. It turns out that business experts all share a common mental model of business, and you can do all sorts of interesting things if you have that model.
@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
4 years
Well well well. Can’t wait to dig in.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
7 hours
RT @stevesi: @ejames_c The productivity paradox of software has been with us since the advent of software automation. The best way to look….
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
Screenshots are taken from the Commoncog case on how Microsoft Office won (despite being an early loser): And from discussions on what winning due to a general purpose technology looks like from the members-only Commoncog forums.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
You can ignore folks who go "we've achieved 10x productivity bla bla follow me I can help you bla bla" because this is NOT what winning looks like; what it looks like is basically good ol' business outcompetition on some existing advantage, just enabled with tech under the hood.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
Whatever that way is, it is:. 1. Unique to your business.2. Must not be obvious.3. Which means that nobody is going to shout about it from the rooftops until AFTER they've won, which is going to take a few years. Which leads to an obvious conclusion . .
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
The way you win with a general purpose technology is to ask: "what new capabilities does this new tech give me so that I can execute a strategy that is coherent with taking business away from my competition, that is difficult to copy?".
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
Look, the way you win with a new general purpose technology is to assume that everyone is going to adopt the new technology at the same time. "You win/lose because productivity gain" is naive. I mean, Toyota kinda learnt this in the 50s?
@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
12 days
“We learnt that raising productivity is no cure-all.”
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
So here's the interesting question: what did winning with cheap computers look like?. The A: it looked like Walmart.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
Why? . I mean, it's obvious why, right?. Because everyone and their dog went for PC courses, so everyone upgraded to PCs together, and everyone bought PCs and office printers, and got the productivity improvements together, and so relative competitiveness stayed the same!
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
Also: I remember doing the research for the Commoncog case on Microsoft Office. We went back to the NYT issue when Office 95 was launched. I'm not kidding about the newspaper being PLASTERED with 'learn Excel/Word' ads. Those course creators were making bank!.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
It's a common narrative: "use new technology X and you will win / don't get left behind." Was widespread during that era. The NYT was plastered with ads selling Wordperfect / Lotus 123 (and later Word and Excel) courses. From @stevesi's memoirs:
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
18 hours
A gentle reminder that we've already had one 'general purpose technology that increased productivity across the board' — the PC. And in that revolution, higher productivity/speed DIDN'T result in company wins.
@staysaasy
staysaasy
1 day
Wild how many people claim to be 10x more productive with AI tools and yet I haven’t heard a single person say that one of their coworkers has become 10x more productive.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
1 day
From: And I highly recommend buying Sinofsky's memoirs, here:
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
1 day
I'm just going to leave this here, because I still find it very funny.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
1 day
There are lots of hilarious stories from early Microsoft Office, recounted in @stevesi's memoirs. Like how the Excel team looked down on the Word team, because they thought "Word was just Excel with one cell". And then there's how background spellcheck was a killer feature . .
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
From @johncutlefish (who has sadly dropped off on Twitter):. ACCURATE.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
If you have a Commoncog membership, read the full case here: (A picture of Bogasari today —)
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
I do think there's something to being 'long-term greedy' that works well. Of course, with the Salims, the Bogasari deal ended unsatisfactorily for Kuok. But he upheld his end of the deal. You can see this conduct repeated again and again throughout his long life.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
I think the reason is simple: Kuok didn't make as much money as he COULD have, but he also didn't lose money on any of these arrangements. They were sound deals. Finally, he was betting that his counterparties would be long-term greedy — that they would need him in the future.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
There are other deals that he did in Indonesia, that we cover in greater detail in the case. But you must ask: why was Kuok so willing to take on such 'unfair' deals? He was a shrewd operator. What did he see that made him willing to stake so much capital on the line?.
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@ejames_c
Cedric Chin
2 days
And I truly mean that he was willing to accept WHATEVER terms they proposed!. For instance, Kuok put up with the fact that he had supplied all the initial expertise and most of the capital for Bogasari, without anything to prove that they were owners.
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