Focusing is about saying ‘no, no, no.’

“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” – Bruce Lee

Nike famously chose not to own factories. Instead, they focused on serving their customers by creating innovative products and engaging stories.

The point is that building and running a factory shifts priorities from customers to production.

I learned this firsthand.

During my tenure at another brand, we built a factory. Almost overnight the target shifted. Now, priorities like finding and training workers, constraints of output, and capitalizing production equipment vied for our attention.

This is not meant to be a value judgment. It’s simply an observation that building a factory changes a brand’s locus.

A recent graph illustrates this point. Apple does not directly own its production. Rather, Apple’s consistent customer-centered innovation in phone cameras enables a set of new behaviors beyond the selfie, the snapshot, or the 10-second video. Apple is putting cinematographic power in the hands of everyone.

This value promise has helped Apple capture 85% of the smartphone market profit. Wow.

In contrast, almost half of the phones on the market are sold for no profit!

Factory-owned brands like OnePlus, Vivo, and Oppo sell phones virtually at cost. Xiaomi is also growing its owned factory portfolio with no apparent boost to the bottom line. Is this causation? Probably not. Probably not. Correlation? Yup.

As the late co-founder of Apple explained “Focusing is about saying ‘no.’ You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no,’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss off people.”

Yet, in Apple’s case, saying yes to the right things seems to “delight” the right people.