The 3 things you must learn as a business leader

Photo credit: REUTERS

Jack Ma is a true rags-to-riches story. He was born into a poor family in Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of communist China. He failed his college entrance examination twice, and was rejected from dozens of jobs, before finding success with his third company, Alibaba.

He jokingly stated that a lot of his failures were due to his looks. His wife, Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school said,

“He is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do.”

One of the things that many handsome men cannot do as well as Jack Ma is to “learn”. Jack Ma is a keen learner. As a teenager, Jack Ma woke up early everyday to work as a tour guide, offering visitors tours of the beautiful Hangzhou city in exchange for English lessons. For businesses, one of his famous quote was, “You should learn from your competitor, but you should never copy. Copy and you die.”

Therefore, as a business leader, what you should learn?

Learn what you do not know

It is obvious that we should have a passion for life-long learning.

However, it is extremely easy for some of us to fill in our knowledge gaps with false information. Our brain has the tendency to automatically make connections and beliefs to help fill in gaps where we do not have full information. We should always accept the fact that there are certain areas that we lack full knowledge, and certain truths that we will not know until later.

One way to learn is to speak to domain experts, customers and peers. Why is your competitor pouring investments into a product that you deemed as outdated? If you do not learn, you may be making decisions on bad information, or you may even fail to recognise good information you come across.

Learn when is the right time to act

Moving at the wrong time can be fatal for your business.

The first mover is a form of competitive advantage a company earns by being the first to move into a market segment. It may bring in customers and capture market share. However, when things change rapidly with technological innovation, the first mover advantage vanishes when your competitor is able to catch up with the best, cheapest and latest technology. This is how emerging markets become technological marvels, where Estonia is the first country to have digital residency.

With the first mover advantage becoming less impactful, we should learn when to stop and wait for the right time to act.

Learn to reflect on your past decisions

Assessing your decisions can help you learn from your wins, challenges and failures.