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Many people's impression of the book is still stuck in the well-known concept of "clockmaker" in the business field, and the author Jim Collins believes that the essence of what great companies have done throughout the ages has been to become the only "clockmaker" in the industry, not "timekeeper".
"Making a clock" is certainly a very sexy rhetoric, but a bell tower often needs a solid foundation to rise from the ground, and in Jim Collins's view, the prerequisite for making a clock – and the cornerstone that will make it green – is what the book describes as "preserving the core and stimulating progress."
The difference between the two is that "clock-making" is a mechanism, the other side and goal that enterprises should rush to, while "preserving the core and stimulating progress" is more like a driving force, and the former will only be possible if the latter becomes sustainable.
Published in 1994, Jim Collins' views have become more valuable over time than in the rapidly changing business world, and it is the fact that the traits of the great companies of the past three decades have been less than exceptional.
It also happened that at the strategic conference of Worth Buy Technology Group a few days ago, I saw that this company, which is not a big factory, exudes the characteristics of "preserving the core and stimulating progress".
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In the public eye, the fame of the technology itself usually does not match its history and products: this company was not only founded in 2010 in the early days of mobile Internet development, but its main product "What is worth buying" has 40 million monthly active users, which is a popular application in the field of e-commerce.
As for the original intention of the birth of "what is worth buying", it is more simple, in the period when BBS was still in its prime, the founder Sui Guodong created a personal blog based on his interest in consumption and content, recommended good brands and good products to netizens, and also screened out discount products to push to users, which formed the predecessor of this product.
On the one hand, there are many uncertainties in the prospects of the industry, on the other hand, the business of shopping guides will not leave much room for reverie from a commercial point of view.
But it turns out that the keywords that can be used to define "what is worth buying" are not shopping guides, but more precisely, content. In the environment where many shopping guide e-commerce companies are emerging, it is unique to recommend good content, and then, the shopping guide industry gradually declined, and what is worth buying has sprung up, and even IPO in 2019. It is precisely the rise of the content consumption track that consumers have a huge demand for content.
From this point on, "what is worth buying" acts as an excellent middleman that can benefit many parties in the fierce e-commerce competition environment, one end of the rope connects merchants who no longer have to think hard about how to get exposure, and the other end is ordinary users who have been struggling to compare platforms and prices between merchants for a long time. And this rope is the standard content carefully created by the platform.
In other words, the transaction chain built by Worth Buy from beginning to end is highly idealized, because theoretically speaking, as long as the product has a high enough cost performance and purchase experience, someone will naturally share the purchase link and reason, forming an agglomeration effect on the commodity.
But it is not easy to realize this model, in fact, the influence of "what is worth buying" from digital forums has still relied on word of mouth for a long time, and followers in the industry have followed, and the business form of e-commerce has also begun to diversify, from the industry to the platform, so that the environment has begun to become noisy.
Founder Sui Guodong said at the press conference two days ago that it is worth buying is not a company that frequently does strategy releases, because if it blindly catches up with the trend and cannot do one thing for a long time and continuously, it probably will not be a good strategy.
It is true that as he said, the last time the company made a strategic adjustment decision was in 2021, and the overall pattern of the e-commerce industry is constantly suffering from the impact of content.
It was at that time that the long-term pursuit was determined from the company to the main products, and no matter how big or small the update iterations were, they all pointed to the same goal, that is, "endlessly improving the connection efficiency between the B-end and the C-side".
From beginning to end, what Worth Buy Technology wants to tell is a story about efficiency, and the reason is very simple, when the connection field of e-commerce has been repeatedly expanded, consumers are in a dazzling array of goods, content and even platforms, which seem to have more choices, but behind it is a sharp rise in screening costs.
So there is the view that "all problems are efficiency problems in the final analysis" in Sui Guodong's mouth, to put it bluntly, what is worth buying is not aimed at a certain model, but the most primitive but most difficult to achieve in the consumer market in the past for matching efficiency.
At this point, it is worth buying technology and has also completed the first half of "preserving the core and stimulating progress".
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On the contrary, a considerable number of the company's veterans, including Sui Guodong, are from technical backgrounds, even though the scale has grown from dozens to thousands, but it has always maintained a high degree of sensitivity to technology.
The intention of the latest strategic conference of Worth Buy Technology is obvious, that is, to make AIGC the key to the future problem-solving company's business and even the entire consumer content track.
On the surface, choosing to enter the game in 2023, which has just experienced the "100 model war", will inevitably make people feel that they are chasing the wind.
It's just that unlike other fields, AIGC is not a catalyst for additional attributes, but a "native ability" that it should have. This is because the help of AI in content understanding and content creation is highly compatible with platforms that adhere to "good content".
In the future, AIGC will not be an optional entrance to the product, but the entire business should be built on the architecture of this emerging technology. In other words, what it is worth buying technology is not the hot outlet of the Internet industry, but the technical solution that can best solve the problem of "efficiency".
For example, the AI product matrix, which was unveiled for the first time at the strategic conference, is a good interpretation of the expansion direction of the future strategic territory of Worth Buying: led by the self-developed Worth Buying consumption model; It includes a database of 450 million pieces of product information and 7 billion pieces of consumer content, and is built on a large model and is responsible for the engine architecture of content understanding, generation and scheduling. and the four types of applications that are ultimately embodied in the product terminal and directly improve the matching efficiency.
In the concept of AIGC, the iterative version of the core product of Worth Buying Technology, "What is Worth BuyingGEN2", in addition to fundamentally solving the problem of connection efficiency, will also establish a highly personalized content ecology through the chain of collection, understanding, generation and distribution of AIGC based on the interests of users.
In other words, the significance of AI to Worthbuy Technology is not only to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but to fundamentally subvert the operational logic of consumer content, and use technology-driven to smooth out the screening costs caused by the excess of consumer content.
More importantly, all these practices have never deviated from the core goals of the enterprise, whether it is the application of AIGC or the change at the product level, they are all aimed at explaining the core of the enterprise to match the efficiency.
Of course, this is not something that everyone can do, it is worth buying the idea of technology, on the one hand, relying on its deep cultivation of the industry for many years in the accumulation of data and experience, on the other hand, it is based on the consistency of strategic goals, in all stages of the development of the e-commerce field, the industry has produced many changes, and the authorities are anxiously seeking the upper limit of growth.
The business world is like this, the more it seems to be a foregone conclusion, the more likely it is to breed huge needs hidden beneath the surface, and it turns out that efficiency, the most basic demand of human economic civilization, will never go out of style.
The so-called never forget, there will be an echo.
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The company's pursuit of efficiency may be a special example in the industry for some time. But the specificity is not elsewhere, only concentration.
Because I know where my goal is, even if I know how many roads there are in the world, even if I know that the general methodology is to do addition, I still decide to travel lightly, with a clear goal and a firm step. It is precisely in this focus that those requirements for self-iteration become more and more meaningful.
Just like today's Internet companies are advocating "doing the difficult but right thing", many times the thing itself is not difficult, but the difficult thing is persistence.