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Surfing a Wave
The idea of a large business force that developed, which a company was able to ride. The metaphor is explained in ‘Poor Charlie’s Almanack’, by Charles Munger:
There’s a tire store chain in the Northwest that has slowly succeeded over the last fifty years, the Les Schwab tire store chain. It started competing with the stores that were owned by the big tire companies that made all the tires, the Goodyears and so forth. And, of course, the manufacturers favored their own stores. Their ‘tied stores’ had a big cost advantage. Later, Les Schwab rose in competition with the huge price discounters like Costco and Sam’s Club and before that Sears, Roebuck and so forth. And yet, here is Schwab now, with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. How did he do it? Well, let’s think about it with some microeconomic fluency.
Is there some wave that Schwab could have caught? The minute you ask the question, the answer pops in. The Japanese had a zero position in tires, and they got big. So this guy must have ridden that wave some in the early times. So, he had to get a wave in Japanese tire invasion, the Japanese being as successful as they were. And then a talented fanatic had to get a hell of a lot of things right and keep them right with clever systems.
