The Insight is the Edge: How Insights Drive Agribusiness Performance
World-class companies lead their customers. These companies lead their customers based on unique insights. In most industries, the businesses with the insights have the edge.
In January of 2024, I wrote The Insight is the Edge: Why CNH Struggles to Keep Up. This wasn’t intended to be a negative take on CNH, but use them as an example to illustrate that a unique insight and point of view is crucial to establish a vision for a thriving business— following the herd, or waiting for your customer to demand something, often means you are too late or that you are competing in a low margin game.
In the article I stated:
World-class companies lead their customers.
These companies lead their customers based on unique insights.
In most industries, the businesses with the insights have the edge.
In the article I didn’t highlight specifically what an insight is, or where they come from which I want to elaborate on.
Insights are fundamental for the success of any business.
An insight is defined as:
the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.
This can be into a customer, a technology or a market for example. An insight that is actionable is what differentiates a business. Acting on an insight allows a company to be different and an insight is core to having a unique strategy. As Michael Porter said in Competitive Strategy:
Underlying the concept of generic strategies is that competitive advantage is at the heart of any strategy, and that achieving advantage requires a firm to make choices. If a firm is to gain advantage, it must choose the type of competitive advantage it seeks to attain and a scope within which it can be attained…The worst strategic error is to be stuck in the middle, or to try simultaneously to pursue multiple strategies. This is a recipe for strategic mediocrity and below-average performance, because pursuing all the strategies simultaneously means that a firm is not able to achieve any of them because of their inherent contradictions.
The business needs to see something different than their competitors and lean into it.
I once talked to a founder that said to me:
“If I gave our competitors our roadmap today, I’d still be confident we’d win. We know our customers problems and the market better and have a bias for action that will keep us ahead.”
This wasn’t arrogance or ignorance, but the acknowledgement that their internal culture was built on having unique insights into the market and their customers that would allow them to deliver more effectively what was necessary for their customers to thrive.
Non Ag Examples
Amazon — Jeff Bezos is famous for stating that he saw a stat about web usage growing at 2300% a year (in 1994) which compelled him to start Amazon and then his insight about focusing on what won’t change— “customers will always want more selection, faster shipping and lower prices.”
Google — In the 1990’s many could see that internet search was going to necessary. However, most search engines were trying to catalogue the internet like a traditional index would. Sergey Brin and Larry Page knew this wouldn’t work as the internet grew exponentially so they built an algorithm based on back-links that would actually get better as the exponential growth of the internet occurred.
Apple — There is a lot of unique insights that Steve Jobs had, but one that doesn’t get talked about enough surrounding their initial iPod business (which was innovative from a design and marketing perspective, too) is that Jobs had an insight into the need to align the incentives of the music industry (record labels), which led to the Apple Music Store.
Ag Industry Examples
There are examples of this today occurring in agriculture, too. Just a few examples of many: