All this said, I want a purple mushroom. It haunts my dreams not because it is a vision of what could be, but because it is a memory of the most terrible sales tragedy I have ever seen. A vision of what was, and was lost.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu expanded on an older Chinese proverb, saying, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” It is for precisely this reason that I’m exploring these concepts. I want to develop a pattern language to articulate what we are seeing in the market, so we can better define ourselves and the other actors in the space that we will inevitably be competing with.
The second habit in Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the End in Mind.” We have discussed this idea of working backwards a lot, but recent conversations have highlighted to me that there is a need to explore the ultimate direction that the market is heading, so we can better articulate why we are doing what we are doing.
Every mushroom grower has some idea about what they should focus on in their operation. The hard truth is that the most fundamental thing a mushroom operation must do is make more money than they spend. Period.