King Wei of Wei intended to attack Handan, the capital of Zhao. Upon hearing this, Ji Liang turned back midway, his robes crumpled and unkempt, his hair still dust-laden, and hastened to seek an audience with the king. "As I was coming here," he said, "I saw a man on the main road driving his carriage northward. He told me, 'I am going to the state of Chu.' I asked, 'If you are going to Chu, why do you head north?' He replied, 'My horse is excellent.' I said, 'Though your horse is excellent, this is not the road to Chu.' He said, 'My provisions are abundant.' I said, 'Though your provisions are abundant, this is not the road to Chu.' He said, 'My driver is highly skilled.' Yet the better these things were, the farther he drifted from Chu. Now Your Majesty, in every endeavor, aspires to establish hegemony and win the trust of all under heaven, yet you rely on the strength of the state and the sharpness of the army to attack Handan, to expand territory and elevate renown. The more frequent your campaigns, the farther you stray from the goal of ruling the realm. This is exactly like going to Chu while heading north."
💡 商战启示录
Ji Liang's fable of "Going South by Driving North" cuts directly to the relationship between strategic direction and execution efficacy in the arena of commerce. King Wei of Wei, relying on his resources—a formidable state with elite troops—embarked on reckless expansion, much like an enterprise that, armed with capital and talent, neglects market demand and its own core strengths, accelerating ever faster down the wrong track until it drifts further from its goal. In modern business warfare, a quintessential case is the former mobile-phone titan Nokia, which, commanding vast resources in the feature-phone era, stubbornly clung to its legacy systems, missed the shift toward smart touchscreens, and was swiftly overtaken by the Apple and Android camps. By contrast, Huawei, in the field of telecommunications equipment, clearly defined a "customer-centric" strategy, focusing on technological R&D and overseas markets; even with limited resources in its early days, its correct direction enabled it to gradually rise to industry leadership. This serves as a warning to corporate leaders: superiority of resources—fine horses, ample gold, skilled charioteers—is but a condition of efficiency, not a guarantee of direction. When formulating strategy, one must repeatedly validate market conditions, user needs, and one's own positioning, so as to avoid the trap of "the harder you try, the further you stray." Meanwhile, decision-makers should, like Ji Liang, maintain an open mind, heed dissenting voices in a timely manner, and establish mechanisms for course correction, rather than compounding momentum along an erroneous path. True business wisdom lies in channeling resources into the right direction and continuously recalibrating—not in blind expansion fueled by resource advantages alone; otherwise, the more you invest, the greater the loss, culminating in a modern-day "Going South by Driving North."