These are observations mainly based on our local businessmen, which I feel is reflective of the thinking of most developing Asian cities.  Your observations may differ depending on your country or culture.

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For the last 20 years, ever since I took up a course of business management for my bachelors, I have been a keen observer of the way we do business and also how people of different countries and cultures do business.

One of the observations

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One advice that you normally won’t read in a lot of business books which is probably one of the more basic ones is to control your cost.  It is not sexy advice, and unlikely something that will sell books, or challenge the imagination.

IN my business, I would say that our focus on controlling cost was one of the factors that enabled us to win over the competition.  When you are in an industry with razor thin margins ( computer hardware), the way to win is to control cost.  Which may be the reason why Mark Hurd ( who stressed cost control and operational efficiency in HP) is much more effective than Carly Fiorina ( who was more on vision and strategies).

As a businessman, know that you cannot control the market, but you can control your cost. Understand how to put that under the control, and if you can do that better than the competition, then the profits should take care of themselves.

There is a great saying in China that should always remind us not to lose our main focus when there are too many distractions in our journey through life. ” He who looks to the stars should not forget the heat of the sun.”