I discussed business with my friends, in the meantime I talked in high spirits with an employee who was from an overseas listed company. In order to make the atmosphere more harmonious, I said “leader of the industry” ”pathfinder” and other complimental words of this kind. The graceful lady kept talking with confidence and composure. While after my compliment, she was more vigorous and said “when some journalists asked our CEO who is your competitors? Our CEO answered we had none”. In the applause of others, I thought I should make the lady a little modest. After all we were the buyers and had to pay for their service. If in this way they would think they were much too competitive. What’s more, she needed to broaden her horizon for she was just at her thirties.

So I said steadfastly, “It is not proper to put it in this way, the height of your CEO’s vision is not enough”.

The earthly things all have connections and there are mountains beyond mountains.

Mobil Oil Corp is the benchmarks around the world, in terms of the comprehensive strength; it has already been the best one. But if we take apart the key indicators，there must be other enterprises that do better than it in America. Therefore Mobil built three teams, which is speed, smile, and appeasement, to find the benchmarks of them. They set the benchmarks as their example to reform the 8000 gas stations all over America. After an earnest searching, they found the three benchmarks at last: the team “speed” focused on Penske; the team “smile” focused on The Ritz-Carlton Hotel as the benchmarks of warm service; the team “appeasement” focused on “Home Depot” as their benchmark. As a result, the enterprise coruscate vitality again.

When we have no competitors in our field, we still need to learn from others across the boundary. We should never be conceited and arrogant when we achieve a little progress.

However, this kind of mental realm is still far from the thinking of the saint --“to act but not to compete”