Every company that ever failed had experts, who were right.
They had engineers who understood the technology.
They had product managers who understood the market.
They had executives who knew exactly what the competition was doing.
Yet many of them still failed.
That was the first thought that crossed my mind when I read Alexander Bloch's recent post on LinkedIn.
He published what I thought was an excellent checklist for anyone writing about the Chinese automotive industry. Eleven questions that force you to ask yourself whether you really understand the market before presenting yourself as an expert.
Shortly afterwards, Wolfgang Paul published his own thoughts on BMW Group's position in China. He was quickly referred back to Alexander's checklist, with the argument that he would probably not even pass three of the eleven questions.
I actually think Alexander's checklist is extremely useful.
If the question is "Who understands today's Chinese automotive market?", then first-hand experience, technical understanding and deep industry knowledge are indispensable. Without them, it is easy to oversimplify one of the most dynamic automotive markets in the world.
Reading what followed, however, made me wonder whether we may only be asking part of the question.
The automotive industry is not simply trying to understand China. It is trying to transform organisations that were built for a different era.
That requires a different kind of expertise.
I was recently reminded of Nokia. Looking back, people often ask how the company could have missed the smartphone revolution. Kodak is asked the same question about digital photography.
The reality is much less dramatic.
Many people inside those companies understood exactly what was happening. They saw the technology. They recognised the competitive threat. They knew what their competitors were doing.
The difficult part was never identifying the change.
The difficult part was changing a successful organisation quickly enough.
Having spent much of my own career in management positions inside large international companies, I have rarely seen organisations fail because they lacked information. More often, they struggled because acting on that information meant changing products, suppliers, investments, processes, incentives and culture-all while continuing to run a successful business.
That is a very different challenge from recognising the technology itself.
Perhaps that is why I have become cautious whenever we define expertise only in technical terms.
Technical experts help us understand where the industry is going.
People who have lived through transformation inside large organisations understand why getting there is so difficult.
The automotive industry needs both.
Looking at Europe today, I increasingly believe the second question may be becoming the harder one.