How to get an industry in a week?

Can you really get an industry in a week?

When I was chatting with people consulting, investment bank, investing and headhunting, I heard the time of the week, and I started to wonder: Under what circumstances do you need to know an industry within one weeks? How do you get to the industry within one weeks?

"Figuring out" an industry within a week is still unlikely to be the top expert in the industry, and it's unlikely to be an executive in the industry. However, you can understand the overall status of an industry, the current situation, the past, the future for a period of time possible trends, familiar with the industry's jargon, the industry's basic information.

What's the use of this?

You can talk to people in that industry, you can stand on the sidelines of your own knowledge and experience to see new opportunities, you can impress your clients, you can get a good job, understand what your boss will consider when making decisions ...

So our public account "change ourselves" invited three guests to tell us how they managed to get an industry within a week.


—————————— The first consulting firm how to get an industry within a week ——————————

One of the founders of a consulting firm was tasked with a job--giving me a report on one industry within a week. To throw a resume and write a report of the university students at home and abroad, but he was disappointed to find that none of the candidates met, the reports he received did not have a bright spot.

How do you get a picture of an industry within one weeks? Let him come and talk to us.

One is the founder of Heng Jia Veda Consulting Co., Ltd., the author of "Sales Everywhere".
He said:
"Understanding an industry" is unlikely to be done by itself. However, if we just want to understand the most basic situation, we can start by asking a few key questions. These key questions revolve around a fundamental question: how does the chain of the industry work?

1 does this industry exist because of the value it provides?
2 What is the link between the source and the end of the industry?
3 who will share the price of the end product in this industry?
4 What is the key factor in each link, and what value has been created to gain the benefits he deserves?
5 who grasps the pricing power of the industrial chain?
6 What is the market concentration in this industry?

The channels of information acquisition include:
1 industry reports of financial investment institutions;
2 Analysis Report of the consulting company;
3 Popular posts in industry exchange websites or forums;
4 Training courseware for industry enterprises;
5 participate in trade fairs or forums;
6 private exchange of practitioners.

1-4 of them are available through web search.

—————————— how people in the second IT consulting firm can get an industry in a week ——————————

There is a calf in it that works in an IT consulting firm.
I asked him: "Do consultation is often to find a short time in the industry ah?" ”
He said, "Yes." ”
"How long will it take?" ”
"One weeks." ”
"Haha, can it be one weeks?" How many people can beat that industry? ”
"90%." "

He is our guest today, the Bear Festival. He has been working at IT consulting firm ThoughtWorks for 8 years and is also a translator for refactoring, see his experience:

Within five days, three steps to understand an industry
As a professional consultant, familiar with an industry in a short time, I often have to face the work content, I am also very willing to share their experience. In my experience, it is not difficult for a consultant who has mastered basic business knowledge to be familiar with a previously unfamiliar industry within one weeks. Of course, one weeks will not allow a new person to become an industry expert, but enough to allow a consultant to work smoothly in this industry.
This is a limited five working day and must be used efficiently. My advice is to go in three steps: First, make sure that you don't open the yellow chamber, and second, let yourself enter the conversation in this industry, and thirdly, try to put forward a bright point.

* First step: Do not open the yellow cavity first
To enter a new industry, you should first understand the leading companies in the industry – probably the ones you need to serve right away. The most direct way to understand a leading enterprise is to read its financial statements. The financial statements of listed companies are public and usually enclose a useful letter from the chairman to investors. Reading a financial report, you can learn a lot of basic information: the nature of ownership of the enterprise, the main business, key customers, revenue structure, cost structure, staff size, talent structure, strategic direction, major risks ... Even if the company you really want to know is a non-listed company (such as Huawei), it must have a lot in common with its main rivals, such as ZTE. So reading the results will give you a basic understanding of the major players in the industry, not to mention some outrageous questions or suggestions.

How to read the financial statements, a more commonly used analysis method is the DuPont analysis method. I have an article about how to use DuPont analysis to interpret a well-known listed enterprises (ZTE) financial statements and business conditions, (article see this) after I did this exercise a year later, ZTE reported a huge loss in the 2012 mid-term earnings, A continuing low profit margin is one of the direct reasons for the company and its main rivals, which have been slashing their jobs since 2012.

After spending a day reading the earnings of one or two companies, it's time to get down to work and read an overview of the industry, for example, I recommend risk management and insurance for the insurance industry. The purpose of reading such a book is to have a deeper understanding of the business model and practice of the industry, for example, you need to know that there are some fundamental differences in property and life insurance, so they will operate very differently; the second is to master the "slang" in some industries, such as when you hear "underwriting" and "underwriting", you need to know what Personally, I read this book in my spare time and add up for about 8 hours.

* Step Two: Enter the industry dialogue
Do not open the yellow cavity is not enough to cxo with the industry to start a dialogue, because people usually do not talk about the most basic things. To get into an industry dialogue, you need to understand the current trends in the industry. Some people would recommend chatting with friends in the industry. But as a time-sensitive inward-oriented people, I personally prefer to research materials, and chat with friends as a supplement.

The best source of industry trends is industry analysis by management consulting firms like McKinsey. I personally recommend the study published by the McKinsey Quarterly (McKinsey Quarterly,http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com) and The Economist (the economist,http:// www.economist.com/) Industry Analysis. Search the two sites for the last five years all the relevant articles related to your industry, spend one or two days to read it all over again, you should be able to grasp the pulse of the industry.

Working in the Chinese market, we worry that analysts from McKinsey and the Economist are not "Chinese-style" enough. My experience is that, on the one hand, some local content can be properly supplemented, on the other hand, the development of all walks of life in China is basically a 3-5-year gap with the world's advanced level, that is to say, what happened in the developed countries 35 years ago is what China is currently doing, What happened in Europe and America a year or two ago should happen in China a year or two later. Compared to the "Chinese characteristics", many times the simple market law and time difference is more effective.

At the same time, throughout the week, you have to immerse yourself in the context of the industry. The solution is simple: subscribe to a bunch of news feeds that are directly related to the industry, the target business you want, and temporarily block the other RSS channels, on the subway, in the coffee shop, on the bedside, on the toilet ... All the free time is used to see what has happened to the industry and the company recently. For example, when I was looking at the Australian insurance industry, I subscribed to Google News's "Australia Insurance" keyword and the name of my client company, any major claims or high-level personnel changes, and I was able to know more about the news than most of my clients ' employees. So there are a lot of topics to talk about.

* The third step: Take me as the main, put forward views

At the beginning of the series, Peng Ying told a story that the founder of a consulting firm asked the candidate to give an industry report within a week, but later he found that none of the reports of the elite graduates had a bright spot. And whether the story is true or false, in my opinion, the crux of the "No bright spot" is that the candidate is a "graduate": Although the study of another industry, in fact, the key to the "bright spot" is not how good the industry research, but in the researcher's own professional skills. The so-called "Kung Fu is outside the poem" is the truth.

For instance. If you look at McKinsey's analysis of China's life insurance industry last year, first you will find that it follows two steps: accurate data, precise terminology, and the industry's pulse. But its highlight is that it points out a few big pain points in China's life insurance industry, and proposes corresponding solutions from the perspective of strategy and management. In the final analysis, this is what the CXO in the industry expect from you as a professional, and the reason why you need to get to know the industry quickly: a quick look at an industry is not about learning, it's about making your expertise work in the industry.

So the key is to combine your own expertise, skills, knowledge, experience, and the situation in this industry to bring up something that no one else has mentioned.

So, after doing the first two steps, you should at least give yourself a full day to answer these three questions:

1. What are the pain points that the industry faces?
2. What are the most pressing pain points for the industry?
3. How do you combine your professional skills with these pain points?

The answers to the first two questions should be relatively objective. In other words, you can print out McKinsey's life insurance industry analysis, throw away the final "solution" section, and then combine your expertise to try to find solutions to some of the biggest pain points it lists. How to improve life insurance sales by means of it? What HR strategy does the life insurance industry need? Even what kind of personality is more suitable for high-level life insurance services? All these. This part of the point is that professionals stand in their own professional field of the proposition composition, can tell the bright spot, the first to quickly understand the target industry's cleverness, the most important thing is to see in their own professional field of attainments.


—————————— the third phase of a headhunter to tell us how to get an industry in a week ——————————

Today we invited a headhunter to talk to us about this topic. Chris gave himself a presentation--in the workplace, hunting in the city. City Hunter.
Let's hear why he's got an industry in one weeks:

Before writing this article, I have never so quantitatively thought about this problem, and now recall that many of the case in the headhunting work, in fact, have done a week to ascertain an industry.

Before I explain how to do this, I would like to make a note: Each industry contains a number of dimensions of content, such as the industry history, status and future, market capacity, consumption scale, and economic, political interaction with the way and degree, the survival of enterprises in the industry, the distribution and dynamics of industry personnel, etc. When we need to get an industry in a short time, it is based on the actual needs of the current job. Therefore, the following is mainly from a headhunter's point of view to explain how to achieve a week within a business.

The headhunting workflow is generally as follows:

Customer demand--headhunting for job analysis--identifying the source of matching talent (industry/enterprise)--Setting a talent search program (i.e. how to reach the target candidate)--Evaluating potential candidates--recommending matching candidates —— ... —— qualified candidates for entry

Usually, it takes 7-10 days to get a new position from the headhunter to recommend the first match to the customer, which requires a single headhunting consultant to find out one or two or three industries within a week, tap into the talent that the customer needs and evaluate it comprehensively. For today's topic, we only discuss the headhunting work "with the target candidate communication" This link can be, the implementation of the overall thinking and operation can be summarized as follows:

1, to delimit the corresponding industry, or expand to the relevant industries.
A. Customers provide basic information about the industry, such as competitors;
B. Consult a friend in the relevant industry;
C. Through the Internet, industry magazines, industry reports, etc., to understand the industry up and down the company's products/services/business model.

2, determine the industry TOP5 or TOP10 Enterprise list, and pay attention to the list sorting standards, and in recent years ranked changes.
A. Consulting friends in the industry;
B. Refer to the Fortune Top 500 per year, and can appropriately expand to understand the changes in the rankings of the past 3-5 years;
C. Through the Internet, industry associations, listed companies, such as information disclosure channels to check the ranking of enterprises (such as sales, growth rate, retail terminal number, etc.), while concerned about the strategic adjustment of enterprises, market layout, new product launches, collection and acquisition information;
D. Access to PE/VC, securities and other financial institutions such as industry/enterprise analysis, case studies, product analysis, industry forecasts and other reports.

3, to lock the listed enterprise organization structure of the corresponding position of the target candidate, through various channels to reach the target candidate.
A. Contact/Consulting Industry/business friends, or friends; (People resources)
B. Search the headhunting company's own database personnel resources;
C. Third-party talent pool resources (e.g. LinkedIn, Weibo, etc.);
D. Cold call (Unfamiliar phone)

Focus:
A. Each person to whom they are contacted, communicate in detail to maximize the data and information of their respective companies, competitors ' specific positions/employees/businesses/products/services;
B. Timely conversion of the information absorbed and used for subsequent contact with the person, while verifying the accuracy and reliability of the information.

When you do the 2nd, you can actually understand an industry 70-80% (the author empirically estimate) even more, and most people may feel that the 3rd implementation of some difficulties, in fact, the situation is not as bad as you think, because you have a lot of friends, and your friends have a lot of friends, let alone "six-degree division theory "To bring you unlimited network resources, as long as you want to dig, your existing network resources to bring you the information will enable you to add 10-20% on the basis of existing 70-80%, conservatively said, this time you are already a half expert in this industry."

Give an example to illustrate.

I have done a case to find a candidate for the South China GM for an international top 3 sugar group. When I first approached this position, I was completely a layman in the sugar industry, knowing only the concepts of sucrose, white sugar and brown sugar in my daily life, and the added sugar of various juices, coffee, biscuits, and so on, not to mention digging people and evaluating their competence.

After starting the project, follow the above method. We follow the requirements of the customer, according to the position of the qualifications, to do the following:

1. Delineation of industry

First in the online search "Sugar Enterprise", "Sugar rankings" and the like keywords, from the search results to understand the domestic sugar enterprises almost local private enterprises and state-owned enterprises, and is divided into sucrose-based southern and stevia sugar-based northern sugar enterprises.

Second, from the "Sugar Industry Analysis", "Sugar Research Report" Search results, understand the sugar industry in China's industrial layout, the advantages of the province, product characteristics, industrial upstream and downstream products, to understand the upper reaches of the sugar industry (sugarcane, stevia planting), midstream manufacturing (sugar mill, slag treatment, etc.), downstream distribution ( Food processing enterprises, beverage manufacturers, food additives companies, such as spot/futures market, etc.).

Finally, expand to the industry downstream of the relevant international group in China to carry out the corresponding business companies, such as the International Food Group, the international four photocopy, Nestle, Pepsi, Chia feed and other enterprises belong to the industry.

2. Determine the list of enterprises in the industry

A. Domestic sugar company: Yangpu South China, Guangxi reclamation, expensive sugar, East Asia sugar, nanning sugar, chicken sugar, English Mao sugar, etc.
B. The international four photocopy ABCD, the domestic Cofco;
C. According to the Fortune Top 500, according to the Enterprise product Classification, determine the food manufacturing or retail business list: Nestlé, Pepsi, Kraft, Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Tyson, etc.;

3, according to the list of enterprises to find the corresponding position of the target candidates, and maximize access to enterprise/industry information, enrich the first two steps of the content.

Because this article mainly to ascertain the industry as the goal, so the 3rd step no longer repeat. Through the first 1, 2 steps of information collection, collation, analysis, plus the 3rd step of the information refinement and mutual proof (also known as the use of network resources), I have in less than a week to ascertain the situation of an industry, and even related industries, and based on this, to complete the client's commission.

Above, is a headhunting practitioner to share to everybody's method.

Ext.: http://www.douban.com/note/276851167/

How to get an industry in a week?