Before the Market Arrives: Kim Jeong-gu’s Five Acts of Competition

I studied literature, but by the end of college I wanted to know more about the business courses other people were taking. A classmate recommended this book by Kim Jeong-gu, who taught at Sungkyunkwan University. I have forgotten many of the case details. I still remember the distinction the book makes between competing in a market and preparing before it exists.

Putting Two Acts Before the Familiar Three

The book begins with the visible parts of competition: opening an early market, moving into the mainstream, and competing once established. Kim calls those the last three acts. Before them he places foresight and building the capabilities that a company will need if the opportunity materializes. That is the part of the competition he wants a manager to pay attention to.

He sets out both obstacles and conditions that make early preparation easier. An immediate success can make the current model feel permanent. Good information can be missed when people inside a company have no route to share it. Kim’s examples are meant to make a company ask what it is in a position to see and what it has grown used to ignoring.

Act One: Learning to See an Opening

The first act moves from sensing to analysis to imagination. Start with shifts that could affect the business. Ask who would be affected and whether a small break from the past could turn into a larger one. Then draw a picture of what a customer might do differently in the future. The order matters: an attractive picture is more useful when you know which observations led to it.

Kim also wants foresight to be something managers practice throughout an organization. A person who spends time with customers or suppliers may notice something an executive has not heard about. Giving observations a place to accumulate and be tested is part of the preparation.

Act Two: Building What You Will Need

The next act turns the picture into work. Kim starts with what the target customer would value and asks what the company could learn to do unusually well. A blueprint can make that idea concrete by describing the larger outcome, dividing it into goals and giving each goal enough time to become testable.

At the end, he asks the reader to try the same thing personally and sketch the next ten years. That exercise was what I could take away from a book named for Steve Jobs and Lee Kun-hee. A person can set down a future they would like and ask what they would have to start doing before it looks plausible to anybody else.