Finding The X Factor
1 April 2008 There’s no substitute for an actual in-country presence in the markets you serve. No amount of research can give someone access to the real sense of a place that can be gained in one week of being there, immersed in it. And if that one week is instead a lifetime: so much the better.
Before I had step foot in China or India, I felt I had a good understanding of their markets. I knew the numbers, the production figures, the trends in crop patterns and input use. I knew a decent amount about the culture and history of each country — although admittedly not as much as I’d like to. But spending time in-country makes such a major impact: it’s like meeting someone in person that you only know from a television show, or tasting a food you’ve only heard described. And while business decisions are often made by the numbers, there is a certain wisdom that must be exercised alongside them.
In the US, today is opening day for our professional baseball season. A multibillion dollar increasingly international business, US Major League Baseball (MLB) is also heaven for number-crunchers. Every statistic you can imagine on the players is out there, and under close analysis. If you want to know how well a certain player fields his position in night games on the road in stadiums with natural grass, you can find it.
One would think that would make it easy to predict the team which will win the championship any season. But the fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. Baseball insiders talk about an “X Factor” – an intangible, un-knowable trait that certain teams have to pull together, overcome the odds, and accomplish the impossible. No matter what any statistic might seem to tell you, these teams find a way to rise above them, and play outside of themselves. It’s fleeting – often the team that taps into it in one season finds it gone by the time the next season begins.
For global ag-chem businesses, it may sometimes be a similar sort of X Factor that makes the difference between success and hardship. While data and analysis can tell us a lot, the prospect of taking on a new market opportunity also requires an intimacy with the market, a knowledge of the people there and what their needs are, and how best to work with them.
Several of the items in today’s eNews relate to companies doing that. DuPont’s Knowledge Centre in India gives it an R&D base in the heart of one of its key growth markets, and the Russia directory provided by the US Dept. of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service provides a summary of companies that can make entry into that country abundantly easier.
Numbers can give you a lot of information. But getting your feet on the ground, or connecting with someone who already does, creates understanding. And that leads to successful decisions.
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