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High Hurdles, Big Payoffs

Hard Goals

Hard Goals

Source:CW

When you're at your lowest point, you have to look to the stars. The tougher the goal, the more likely it is to unleash your true potential. More than a few success stories start with daunting tasks that compel performance under pressure.

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Hard Goals

By Isabella Wu, Hsiao-Wen Wang
From CommonWealth Magazine (vol. 480 )

It's been an eventfully disturbing month.

Seismic shockwaves have jolted the global technology industry. Last month, Google acquired Motorola Mobile Communications, PC leader Hewlett-Packard pulled out of its substantial consumer electronics interests, and Apple founder Steve Jobs stepped down as the company's CEO.

These three major events all serve notice to Taiwan's technology industry and the companies and individuals involved therein that it's time to discard the old ways and face up to the new reality.

At a forum organized by CommonWealth Magazine and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturers Association, Quanta chairman Barry Lin noted that as Google had once disrupted Microsoft, Apple was now set to disrupt Google, with the imminent release of the iCloud.

"If you're not out disrupting others, it will be others disrupting you," he said.

Like a camel setting off into the blazing desert sun, hoofs plodding through shifting sands, executives at Taiwanese companies are at work crafting new strategies and setting new goals amidst a shifting global environment. On the one hand, they're forging ahead amid the thirst and hunger within the desert of the marketplace; meanwhile, they're fearful that the goals they've wracked their brains to formulate are nothing more than the mirage of an oasis.

At this critical moment when the direction of the second half of the year remains murky, how are we to re-imagine where we're heading?

Actually, we often forget that goals are among those extremely rare tools for self-breakthrough that we can actually control. In fact, the tougher and more challenging those goals are, the more able they are to unleash our true potential, to drive us beyond ingrained habits, and ultimately to produce higher rates of attainment.

Setting "hard goals" with exceedingly high degrees of difficulty can make ordinary people achieve the extraordinary and completely transform a business.

A Dose of Ordinary Perseverance

One of the three "thousand Taiwan dollar" shares listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, TPK Holdings Co., Ltd., a major maker of touch screen modules, seems today a company with a boundless future. TPK manufactures the touch screens on one of every two iPads produced. One in three glass-paneled touch screen interface panels worldwide comes from TPK. But this massive business actually started out tiny.

As a child, TPK chairman Michael Chiang lived a bucolic life, sowing rice and tending water buffalo alongside his mother in the green fields of Tucheng Township. After graduating with a degree in business management from Fujen University, he took NT$50,000 in seed money the family gave him, and in time made himself Taiwan's computer monitor king.

"I've had entrepreneurial blood since I was a child and have never let anyone lead me by the nose," Chiang says.

While lacking a family fortune or the glow of an elite education backing him, what Chiang possessed was sheer ambition.

"I wanted to be a child of achievement, someone my mom would be proud of," says the 58 year-old Chiang, equally fluent in Taiwanese and English, seeming almost childlike when discussing his 90-year-old mother.

That motivation energized Chiang to look to the stars even at the lowest points of his life.

"At those times when you're most dejected, you think, I can't allow my mother to be ashamed of me," he says.

In 2005, armed with touch screen technology he'd spent 10 years and NT$1.2 billion developing, Chiang boldly set off for Finland to directly approach mobile phone giant Nokia, then in command of more than 40 percent of the global market.

"How much?" Nokia executives asked.

"Three times the cost of what's currently available," Chiang answered.

"Come back and see me when your technology is as good as mine, or cheaper," came the rebuff.

As it turned out, Nokia felt that without a stylus, it simply wasn't "touch screen." Chiang had no alternative but to lock away his technology for a later date.

After having Nokia and 3M slam the door in his face, Chiang turned for cooperation to Apple, which had yet to release the iPhone and whose Macintosh computers held just a five-percent market share.

At the time, Chiang had no idea how Apple would put touch screen to use or what any product might look like, nor could he possibly imagine what hot sellers the iPhone and iPad of today would become.

But he nonetheless upped the ante. In 2007, TPK had operating revenue of less than NT$6 billion (around one-tenth that of last year), yet sank NT$900 million of that into development of projective capacitive touch technology.

Although after the initial release of the iPhone TPK continued to post losses of US$9 million in the first seven months of 2008, Chiang remained determined to pursue development of the touch screen goal, in fact accelerating the process.

Chiang's confidence in the ultimate outcome was due to having thoroughly thought through the technology and the team who would make it prior to even setting his goals.

"I think I'm pretty determined," Chiang says. "Although business may have its ups and downs, if the product is right, the technology is right and the people are right, we'll be all right."

He was merely certain that touch screen technology was the direction in which to go; he had no idea that the market for his company's technology would explode and vault TPK into the forefront.

A dose of ordinary perseverance has made TPK an industry legend, its operating revenue growing by a magnitude of 10 over the past four years, and its factory space expanding sevenfold over the past two years.

Its goal of carving out a stable niche market has thrown TPK into the arms of Apple and created a new US$10 billion touch screen market, rewriting the rules of the game in the process.

Making a Bold Move

Furthermore, the higher and tougher you set your goals, the greater the likelihood of leaping out of your comfort zone to employ innovative methods and explore new possibilities.

As Taipei sweltered under the oppressive late-July heat, an unexpected breath of fresh air breezed through.

Fashion icon Sara Jessica Parker, who plays lead character Carrie Bradshaw in the HBO franchise Sex and the City, had arrived in Taiwan. She shopped for hair clips in Ximending, visited Xingtian Temple and even took in a figure skating revue at Taipei Arena.

Wherever Parker appeared in public there was a tie-in with the skincare line Artistry. That was the new challenge for Amway Taiwan president H.W. Chen.

Dressed in an elegant black suit adorned with an eye-catching white camellia corsage, Chen has a knack for attracting attention.

After receiving her MBA from National Chengchi University, she started knocking on doors before finally persuading then-McDonald's Taiwan vice president Joseph Han to hire her onto his marketing staff.

At the time, McDonald's had virtually no marketing presence in Taiwan. From her stint at McDonald's, Chen moved on to marketing gigs with Unilever, Disney and other multinationals.

In 2006, she was named president of Amway Taiwan, the company's first female president in its 25 years in Taiwan.

When she accepted the job, she accepted the massive objective of breaching the NT$10 billion mark in operating revenue. Amway Taiwan's operating revenue for 2005 was just over NT$6.1 billion.

"I had to come up with something different," Chen says. Annual growth of 20 or 30 percent can be achieved through sheer grit and hard work, but if revenues were to be doubled in such a brief period, the same old tried and true models of success could not be relied upon.

Chen needed to broaden the company's vision and rethink its growth equation.

New brands were constantly entering the competition for a piece of Taiwan's NT$60 billion direct sales market. If Amway Taiwan were to make headway in expanding its direct sales, it would have to take a bite out of that same pie.

But from the perspective of product lines, Amway is stretched across different sectors, showing particular promise for high growth in health food and skincare products, each with NT$100 billion in market potential.

"Amway had to do branding," Chen explains.

Amway could achieve a breakthrough in growth through the use of branding to expand sales and enlarge its share of the health food and skincare product markets, she reasoned.

It was a bold, unprecedented move to have Amway's massive, people-savvy sales force set about on branding missions in their various markets.

The general public may still not grasp the connection between Amway and the fashionable image Parker projects. But if there is one thing Amway Taiwan's 300,000 direct marketers are finally fully aware of, it's that Amway has set out on a new phase in its journey of growth.

The Moon as Your Goal

Regardless of how many of your tough goals are actually achieved, the point is for ordinary folks to get out there and take a shot at the road less traveled.

"You need to set a 'I'm shooting for the moon' type of goal," Chen says with a laugh.

"With the moon as your goal, the arrow in your bow will at least hit the owl in the tree," she says. "If your goal is set at the owl in the tree, the arrow may only hit the rock on the ground."

The world inevitably changes, and you must deftly readjust your footing to remain at the summit. When you're at a crossroads, you must listen to the drumbeat of your heart before setting off down a new path.

Those tough goals help ferry us through the darkness of night to emerge in a bright, brand new day on the other side.

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy

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