i finally recognized the insurmountable gap between me and a successful sharpshooter, which may take my next one and half years and even longer to fill it up, ---- it was kidding, i mean, i may not contribute my lifetime into the silly tricky experiment, but definitely, i gotta finish the basic learning process of -- how to be a newbie of the unfathomable field. the story began with a class of mine. we are devided into groups and supposed to work together each week to handle our car companies. our team make great cars in the first round, we measured customer expectation percentages and even tried to beyond their expectations, and we earned around 30% net profit per car, which we thought were pretty high though. we spent a lot of money in advertising and technology developments, what else, yes, we spent more than one hour to come up with a mission statement, slogan and marketing strategies. we were expecting the result. but we lost. we compared our information with the best team, there was only one conclusion, that is, their cars were wastrel! they completely ignored consumer expectations, but put the features at 75% of the lowest expectations because that's the lowest costs that the game allowed to put, and then ,charged the highest prices. wtf??? i mean, how could companies like this be the first of the industry? they had low sales forecasts, so they didn't have any inventory left over, and didn't need to buy plants. cash left over were used to retire long-term debts, which made stock price higher. so, even though they had small part of market share, they made the most money and highest stock price. we had to admit that -- consumers are idiots. so, in the second round, we lower the quality of our cars and charge the highest prices, and guess what,,, we made a hugh progress, and became a strong competitor of the best teams, the stock price got higher, and we retired loans instead of borrowing. and the third round, which was just completed, we lowered our quality even more to get around 50% profits, but sadly, they are still lower than those best companies' net profits, which usually higher than 60%. POOR CONSUMERS!!! that's not fair to them, what we want is simply better cars, lower price more profits, same thing they want. but they don't buy it! they want cars with poor quality and higher prices! i can't imagine... is it the same how things work in the real world??? hope not... and btw, the tricky way of managing companies were passed from students last year, and they gave all the information, figures, homework answer keys and even exams to the best teams' members. i know that's happen in real world, but i still hate it. now i'm 100% agree with the buddy in my group said "i wanna kill those assholes in class"... and in real life, if possible. 