I frequently get asked how Ananda grew to be No 1 and what's to stop other companies doing the same and hurting our business.
The first part of the answer is that what seems to be the answer, that Ananda was first to see the value of the mass transit, isn't the real answer. The real answer is that Ananda produced a cluster of innovations, in location, unit design, marketing, demographic analysis, building design and many more, that together gave us sufficient competitive advantage to overtake the incumbents and become the biggest seller of condominiums in Thailand by the first quarter of this year.
None of these alone would have been enough. It took multiple inno-vations together to break through.
And we continue to innovate, consistently, over and over. Just this year we issued the first perpetual security by a Thai real-estate company, became the first in the world to launch Samsung's SmartHome technology, began implementing BIM (building information modelling) and TQPMS (total quality project management system) and many others.
We have noticed that other companies have adopted what is known as a "fast follower" strategy towards us - they adopt our innovations as soon as they see them. This is a very valid strategy to stop falling too far behind a company that is innovating rapidly.
However, although they can copy what we do, they can't copy the culture within the company that produces so many innovations in the first place and, more important, allows these innovations to come through and be implemented. Cultures are very hard to change within a company once they've been set.
But even within Ananda, we're wrestling with a number of issues related to innovation. If we want our employees to innovate and implement innovations and make them real, we're basically asking them to think and act like entrepreneurs. How do you manage that within a large company?
Entrepreneurs, by definition, are less likely to apply to work for a large company, so how do we get these kinds of people to agree to work for Ananda?Culture and evidence of support for innovation helps, as do compensation and key performance-indicator systems that recognise and reward innovation, but that is much easier said than done.
And presuming we do manage to hire them, how do we manage them alongside the many existing staff who are primarily involved in routine activities in the company? Should they have the same incentive scheme, the same training scheme, the same authority, lines of communication?
If there's entrepreneurial spirit already in the company at lower levels, how do we identify that and let it express itself while managing potential tensions within a corporate structure that is necessarily optimised to perform its existing activities ever more efficiently, which tends to lead to standardisation?
Also, true entrepreneurs will eventually want to spin out of Ananda as an independent company. How do we manage this? Do we refuse, as we need their skills at Ananda, and risk losing them anyway, or find some way to support the spinout, maybe on a parttime basis?
Or is there a way to have "virtual spinouts" where the entrepreneur can act as an entrepreneur while remaining within Ananda?
So even at Ananda, which has achieved its success by being able to innovate and successfully deploy innovations effectively, we are wrestling with many issues. Some have always been here, some are emerging as Ananda gets larger as a company, and some are current issues due to the greater opportunities our previous success has afforded us.