Observation, Intuition & Tactics

Watch these young men and women in red. They are at the Hangzhou railway station on a hot summer morning – when the sun can almost burn you. These people are selling Hangzhou-Shanghai bus tickets.
(Hangzhou is a popular travel destination in China, it is also the birth place of the famous Chinese silk among many other specialties that it has to its credit).
There is a train between Hangzhou and Shanghai almost every 40 minutes. Thus it would be expected, that selling bus tickets would be rather difficult given the good frequency of trains. Yet these salesmen have found a novel way of doing it. They appear around the train ticket office immediately after one train leaves and continue to be there, selling bus tickets up until 15 minutes before the next train is expected to leave. They have figured out that a sizable chunk of passengers does not like to wait for more than 15 (bus frequency is about one every 15 minutes).

They did not seem to use any technology tool to derive this conclusion however they have intuitively found a way of sequencing the frequency of bus service between the two cities. And to top it all it seems to be working fine.

To me it offers two fundamental learnings for business:

1.Keen observation and intuition helps develop a smart product or service

2.Flexibility & agility is critical as we place our product or service in the market

I am reminded of what I recently read in “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreau, “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” In fast growing markets like China and India and in times of rapid technology change, agility is an imperative. There is a lot that these ingenious everyday entrepreneurs on the street, can teach us form their daily stories of survival and growth through their bottom up tactics.