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226 ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

it with copiers when they moved in and took away a large share of the
market from the original inventor, the Xerox Company. The Japanese, in
other words, have been successful again and again in practicing “entre-
preneurial judo” against the Americans.
But so did MCI and Sprint when they used the Bell Telephone
System’s (AT&T) own pricing to take away from the Bell System a
very large part of the long-distance business (see Chapter 6). So did
ROLM when it used Bell System’s policies against it to take away a
large part of the private branch exchange (PBX) market. And so did
Citibank when it started a consumer bank in Germany, the
“Familienbank” (Family Bank), which within a few short years came
to dominate German consumer finance.
The German banks knew that ordinary consumers had obtained
purchasing power and had become desirable clients. They went
through the motions of offering consumers banking services. But they
really did not want them. Consumers, they felt, were beneath the dig-
nity of a major bank, with its business customers and its rich invest-
ment clients. If consumers needed an account at all, they should have
it with the postal savings bank. Whatever their advertisements said to
the contrary, the banks made it abundantly clear when consumers
came into the august offices of the local branch that they had little use
for them.
This was the opening Citibank exploited when it founded its
German Familienbank, which catered to none but individual con-
sumers, designed the services consumers needed, and made it easy
for consumers to do business with a bank. Despite the tremendous
strength of the German banks and their pervasive presence in a
country where there is a branch of a major bank on the corner of
every downtown street, Citibank’s Familienbank attained domi-
nance in the German consumer banking business within five years
or so.
All these newcomers—the Japanese, MCI, ROLM, Citibank—
practiced “entrepreneurial judo.” Of the entrepreneurial strategies,
especially the strategies aimed at obtaining leadership and dominance
in an industry or a market, entrepreneurial judo is by all odds the least
risky and the most likely to succeed.
Every policeman knows that a habitual criminal will always com-
mit his crime the same way—whether it is cracking a safe or entering
a building he wants to loot. He leaves behind a “signature,” which is as
individual and as distinct as a fingerprint. And he will not change that