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Competition used to be easy. That is in theory, if not always in practice. Until recently, most competent companies had a clear idea of who their rivals were, how to compete and on what field to fight.
竞争曾经很容易。从理论上来说如此，即便实际上并非总是如此。直到不久以前，多数胜任的公司都清楚自己的竞争对手是谁，如何竞争以及在哪个领域竞争。
One of the starkest — and scariest — declarations of competitive intent came from Komatsu, the Japanese construction equipment manufacturer, in the 1970s. As employees trooped into work they would walk over doormats exhorting: “Kill Caterpillar!”. Companies benchmarked their operations and market share against their competitors to see where they stood.
最露骨也最可怕的竞争意图宣言来自上世纪70年代的日本工程机械制造商小松(Komatsu)。员工上班时踩过的脚垫有这样的口号：“消灭卡特彼勒(Caterpillar)！”。企业会以竞争对手为对照，衡量自己的业务和市场份额，看看自己处在什么地位。
But that strategic clarity has blurred in so many industries today to the point of near-invisibility thanks to the digital revolution and globalisation. Flying blind, companies seem happier to cut costs and buy back their shares than to invest purposefully for the future. Take the European telecommunications sector. Not long ago most telecoms companies were national monopolies with little, or no, competition. Today, it is hard to predict where the next threat is going to erupt.
但由于数字革命和全球化，这种战略能见度如今在很多行业变得模糊，几乎到了看不见的地步。两眼一抹黑的企业似乎更乐意削减成本和回购股票，而不是抱着明确目的为未来投资。以欧洲电信行业为例。不久前，多数电信企业都是国有垄断企业，竞争很少，甚至毫无竞争。如今，很难预测下一个威胁将在何处爆发。
WhatsApp, the California-based messaging service, was founded in 2009 and only registered in most companies’ consciousness when it was acquired by Facebook for more than $19bn in 2014. Yet in its short life WhatsApp has taken huge bites out of the lucrative text messaging markets. Today, WhatsApp has close to 1bn users sending 30bn messages a day. The global SMS text messaging market is just 20bn a day.
总部位于加州的讯息服务WhatsApp创建于2009年，在2014年以逾190亿美元被Facebook收购时才被多数企业注意到。然而，成立没几年的WhatsApp在有利可图的文本信息市场占据了巨大份额。如今，WhatsApp拥有近10亿用户，每天发送300亿条信息。全球文本短信市场每天的信息量只有200亿条。
Car manufacturers are rapidly wising up to the threat posed by new generation tech firms, such as Tesla, Google and Uber, all intent on developing “apps on wheels”. Chinese and Indian companies, little heard of a few years ago, are bouncing out of their own markets to emerge as bold global competitors.
汽车制造商正迅速意识到新一代科技公司构成的威胁，例如特斯拉(Tesla)、谷歌(Google)和优步(Uber)，它们都试图开发“车载应用”。几年前还不为人知的中国和印度企业，正迈出国门，涌现为大胆的全球竞争者。
As the driving force of capitalism, competition gives companies a purpose, a mission and a sense of direction. But how can companies compete in such a shape-shifting environment? There are perhaps two (partial) answers.
作为资本主义的推动力，竞争赋予企业目标、使命和方向感。但企业在这种日新月异的环境下怎么竞争？对此可能有两个（不完全的）答案。
The first is to do everything to understand the technological changes that are transforming the world, to identify the threats and opportunities early.
首先是尽全力了解正在转变世界的科技变革，及早识别威胁和机遇。
Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT, the British telecoms group, says one of the functions of corporate leaders is to scan the horizon as never before. “As a CEO you have to be on the bridge looking outwards, looking for signs that something is happening, trying to anticipate it before it becomes a danger.”
英国电信(BT)首席执行官加文•帕特森(Gavin Patterson)表示，企业领导人的职能之一是以前所未有的警觉审视地平线。“作为CEO ，你不得不站在船舶驾驶室向远处眺望，寻找情况正在发生的蛛丝马迹，努力在它成为危险之前做好防范。”
To that end, BT has opened innovation “scouting teams” in Silicon Valley and Israel, and tech partnerships with universities in China, the US, Abu Dhabi, India and the UK.
为此，英国电信在硅谷和以色列设立了创新“侦察队”，并与中国、美国、阿布扎比、印度和英国的大学展开了科技合作。
But even if you foresee the danger, it does not mean you can deal with it. After all, Kodak invented the first digital camera but failed to exploit the technology. The incentive structures of many companies are to minimise risk rather than maximise opportunity. Innovation is often a young company’s game.
即便你预见到危险，也并不意味着你能够对付它。毕竟，柯达(Kodak)发明了第一台数码相机，但未能利用这种技术。很多企业的激励结构是为了将风险降至最低，而不是将机遇最大化。创新往往是年轻公司的游戏。
The second answer is that companies must look as intensively inwards as they do outwards. Well-managed companies enjoy many advantages: strong brands, masses of consumer data, valuable historic data sets, networks of smart people and easy access to capital. But what is often lacking is the ambition that marks out the new tech companies, their ability to innovate rapidly and their extraordinary connection with consumers. In that sense, the main competition of so many established companies lies within their own organisations.
第二个答案是企业必须既专注地向外看，还要向内看。管理有方的企业具备很多优势：强大品牌、海量消费者数据、宝贵的历史数据系列、聪明人网络以及资金获取容易。但他们往往缺乏的是新兴科技公司特有的那种雄心、快速创新的能力以及打动消费者的悟性。就此而言，很多老牌企业的主要竞争存在于企业内部。
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, constantly urges his employees to keep being radical. In his Founders’ Letter of 2013, he warned that companies tend to grow comfortable doing what they have always done and only ever make incremental change. “This . . . leads to irrelevance over time,” he wrote.
谷歌联合创始人拉里•佩奇(Larry Page)不断敦促他的员工保持敢想敢干。在他2013年的创始人信函(Founders’ Letter)中，他警告称，企业往往变得满足于他们一直做的事情，只会做出增量变革。他写道：“随着时间推移，这……会导致变得无足轻重。”
Google operates a 70/20/10 rule where employees are encouraged to spend 70 per cent of their time on their core business, 20 per cent on working with another team and 10 per cent on moonshots. How many traditional companies focus so much on radical ventures?
谷歌实行70/20/10规则，员工被鼓励将他们70%的时间用于核心业务，20%用于与另一个团队合作，10%投入试验性的激进项目。有多少传统企业会把这么多注意力放在激进项目上？
Vishal Sikka, chief executive of the Indian IT group Infosys, says that internal constraints can often be far more damaging than external threats. “The traditional definition of competition is irrelevant. We are increasingly competing against ourselves,” he says.
印度IT集团Infosys首席执行官史维学(Vishal Sikka)表示，内部局限的破坏性往往要比外部威胁严重得多。他表示：“竞争的传统定义已不重要了。我们正越来越多地与自己竞争。”
Quoting Siddhartha by the German writer Hermann Hesse, Mr Sikka argues that companies remain the masters of their own salvation whatever the market pressures: “Knowledge can be communicated. Wisdom cannot.” He adds: “Every company has to find its own unique wisdom.”
史维学援引德国作家赫尔曼·黑塞(Hermann Hesse)的著作《悉达多》(Siddhartha)中的话辩称，不管市场压力如何，企业仍然是他们自己救赎的主人：“知识可以沟通。智慧不能。”他补充称：“每家公司都必须找到自己独特的智慧。”
