Competing Honorably

A year or so back my colleague Jun Chie shared a great advertisement from Honda Racing, thanking their top Formula 1 competitors on the day of Honda's final race before retiring from participation after nearly 60 years. That's right, THANKING their competitors. The idea of an organization showing respect and gratitude for its competitors has long resonated with me, and I made a brief comment on Jun's post at the time. Reflecting further on this idea brought to mind an experience I had with a business competitor a decade or so ago. I'll share that experience here as I think it provides a good example outside the world of sport.

The electronic test industry is an aggregation of suppliers serving many different markets and end applications, and even the biggest suppliers do not participate in all product and solution categories. When an established supplier announces that it plans to enter a major product category already offered by its competitors, it understandably draws a lot of attention. Such was the case in the mid-2000s, when a large Agilent competitor announced it would enter the oscilloscope business, a product category then amounting to approximately $1B in worldwide revenue.

They began by purchasing a small, low-end player, but then sought to develop their own, higher-performance products. To do this, they had to acquire market insight and build a technology pipeline, and it took several years for the first products to appear. But appear they did, in the summer of 2010. Our team did its usual "Day 1" competitive analysis, based primarily on material published on the web. Also as usual, a deep-dive analysis including detailed measurements, usability comparisons, and a tear-down to assess technologies and estimated manufacturing costs, would have to wait until we could get our hands on a unit. In the meantime, we kept our antennas up for further intelligence and kept working our own business.

My travel plan that fall included attending a major electronics trade show in Europe for which Agilent was a key sponsor. Most of our competitors would also have booths promoting their products and solutions. A couple weeks before the event, our local marketing leader there received a very unusual invitation: The new oscilloscope competitor that had recently released their first organically-developed products offered to provide a private, after-hours demo to him, and to "Jay Alexander, the head of your company's oscilloscope business." The contacts at the competitor explained that while the new scope would feature prominently at their booth, not all their booth staff had been deeply trained on it yet, and it could make for an uncomfortable Q&A with an Agilent VP who knew a lot about oscilloscopes and their constituent technologies. It would be better for everyone to have an in-depth briefing from the experts, out of the fray of the show.

How could one not accept such a unique invitation? During the show I surfed by their booth a few times to get a sense of the attendee traffic (this is standard practice at trade shows ??), but didn't bother any of their staff by asking for a demo. Then after the show had closed for the day the two of us left to meet with the scope's lead architect and the product manager. We received a great demo, clearly coming from people who had put a lot of thought and work into the product. We also talked about technical challenges such as the tradeoffs involved in creating high-bandwidth probes and the complications of calibrating time-interleaved A/D converters. Nothing confidential was disclosed on either side. We learned about the new product, but at heart it was a discussion among engineers sharing a love for technical challenges and product innovation to meet customer needs. They expressed admiration for Agilent's high-end products (their entry was a midrange family), along with our active probes and application software packages, and I congratulated them on their hard work and the innovations they had landed in their new machines. After an hour or so we shook hands and parted ways. I think everyone valued the interaction. When our team in Colorado subsequently received the unit we had ordered for competitive analysis, a special note and photo from the two individuals we had met was included in the box, congratulating us on purchasing a state-of-the-art product that would help "get your new scopes to market faster and increase throughput in production." That was a humorous touch, though of course our companies and employees continued to compete in the marketplace just as fiercely as we always had.

Our meeting was discreet but was never particularly kept secret, and upon learning about it some of my colleagues had a hard time understanding why our competitor would do such a thing. Were they trying to hire me away? Were they somehow trying to intimidate us? Some of the theories honestly made me chuckle, because they overlooked the core idea: The interaction was all about mutual honor and respect between competitors. Those two leaders at our competitor knew the history of the oscilloscope business, and they knew my role in it, going back to the first Infiniium. They honored and respected me and my colleague, and our company, by offering us the private demo and discussion. And we honored and respected them by taking them up on their offer and acknowledging all they had achieved in creating their new product and bringing it to market. It actually reminded me of stories from early in HP's history, when Bill and Dave were said to have given pre-show briefings to their competitors on the new products they would be featuring, to help push everyone in the industry forward with the latest in measurement technology.

One could argue that in some situations a competitor may not merit honor and respect, based on their demonstrated values or past behavior. I think those cases definitely exist. Some organizations take the "business is war" metaphor too far. Business is usually a battle for customers and the revenue they provide, but that means the competition is really about how to best satisfy the customer, not how to destroy the competitor. In my experience, competing honorably is a more fulfilling way for people to pursue their passions and apply their skills, especially over the long term. Customers prefer, and increasingly demand, suppliers that compete honorably vs. those who spend their energies bad-mouthing the competition or otherwise losing focus on meeting customer needs in a mature and professional way. This is one reason why reputable companies like Agilent and Keysight (and the competitor in this story) have codes of ethics and Standards of Business Conduct covering every employee and every facet of their businesses.

What our oscilloscope competitor did was a class move in my opinion, just as what Honda did was. Neither move was required, by law or even by the companies' codes of ethics, but they both demonstrated competing with honor in ways that I admire.

Thanks again Jun for sharing the ad from Honda, and thanks to all the companies and employees competing with honor every day. And speaking of electronics trade shows, all the best to those attending DesignCon in Santa Clara this week! That show was initiated by HP people from Colorado Springs over 30 years ago and is still a favorite for many of us in the industry.