In Other Words - SAS Senior VP and CMO Jim Davis talks about business, analytics and technology

When I first visited Tokyo for SAS in the ‘90s, it was like traveling a few years into the future. I don’t see Tokyo that way anymore. It doesn’t feel much different than going to Toronto or Chicago or New York.



Japan is experiencing a serious downturn. They’ll come back, but things will never be the same. Think about it. They used to dominate consumer electronics, but not anymore. Who dominates portable music? It’s not Sony anymore, it’s Apple, and Apple’s stuff is manufactured in China.

What are Japan’s core competencies? It’s certainly the banking center of Asia, but who knows, in our lifetimes that might go to China as well. It reminds me so much of New York: there are leaders in the financial world who are rising above the herd, but there are also a lot of stodgy old bankers trying to figure out what to do.

We’ve experienced the same shifts in North Carolina, which for decades had an economy dependent on furniture manufacturing and textiles, and that’s shifted to Asia. We were lucky that we had visionaries like Luther Hodges who understood the need to plan for the future and drove the creation of Research Triangle Park in 1959.

(As an aside, I watched a two hour special about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock recently. RTP was ten years old in 1969. It’s hard to imagine that this and this were only ten years apart.)

Just as nations have core competencies, obviously, so do businesses. At SAS our core competencies are knowledge-based, and that keeps me up at night. We have an awful lot of smart people who work here, but there are still plenty more smart people out there. Our constant challenge is to provide value for our customers beyond what they could get from a competitor or an open source solution. We continue to be successful at it, but we can never allow ourselves to become complacent. Whenever we find ourselves doing something “because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” we kill off a piece of our future.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the “hedgehog concept,” figuring out what you’re passionate about, what you can be the best at, and what drives your business. I’m constantly amazed at how few businesses actually take the time to sit down and figure this out.

How much time do you spend thinking about your core competencies, and what are you doing to protect yourself against these kinds of tectonic shifts? And what’s keeping you up at night?


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