The Slope Matters

I was reading Apple in China, and there is a pattern in the book that I found interesting.

Apple goes through this long supply chain journey. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China. Each place has problems at the beginning. The quality is not good enough. The process is not tight enough. The teams are not learning fast enough. Something is missing.

But the important thing is not the starting point. It is the slope.

You can see it in Korea. A company like LG may not have everything figured out immediately, but there is ambition there. There is hunger. They want to learn.

You see it again with Foxconn, which is Taiwanese. Same thing. Ambition, speed, willingness to absorb whatever Apple knows and turn it into capability.

And then you see it in China. The book describes people working incredibly hard, trying to learn everything, trying to suck in as much knowledge as possible. They are not starting from perfect quality. They are starting from intensity and a willingness to improve.

That is the part I find amazing.

When you go to a place and it is bad, that does not mean it will stay bad. The question is whether the slope is good. Are people learning? Are they aggressive? Are they dedicated? Are they embarrassed by the gap, or have they accepted it?

If the slope is strong enough, the starting point matters much less than people think.

You can see this in Korea, Taiwan, and China. They may have started behind, but they were moving. And if a society or company is moving fast enough for long enough, eventually the world wakes up and realizes the gap is gone.