After Reading “Enterprise Renaissance 3: Taiwan’s New Track”: Written for SME Owners Who Know They Must Transform but Cannot Get Moving

*▲ Transformation is never about changing to a different track, but about acknowledging that the winning method you were originally familiar with has expired. *

Every time I go to a company to teach AI introduction, few of the people who stay after class to ask questions are young colleagues, mostly bosses or second generation. Their questions are also very similar: “Teacher Vista, I understand everything you said, but what should you do first after you go back?”

I have always felt that this sentence contains the most real situation of small and medium-sized enterprises in Taiwan. It’s not that I don’t know how to change, it’s that I don’t know where to start, and I’m not sure how much time I have left to try and make mistakes.

In his chief-editor preface to Enterprise Renaissance 3: Taiwan’s New Track (opens in a new tab), Huang Rican accurately points out this situation: Many operators “know” that the world is changing, but their “power” cannot keep up with the environment and lack a strong sense of urgency, resulting in a “gap between knowledge and action.” Taiwan Industrial Creation Platform (opens in a new tab) After more than six years of interviews with more than a hundred companies, this is the first book “Enterprise Creation. “Taiwan Takes a New Path” is the ignition, and the second book “Enterprise Creation 2. “Taiwan’s New Game” is the beginning. What this third book has to deal with is the dead end of “knowing but not being able to do it.”

This is not a corporate commendation conference

I am actually wary of corporate interview books. The structure of most such books is as follows: first a story about the founder’s hardships, the middle part contains several turning points, and the end focuses on vision and mission. It’s very inspiring after reading it, but you can’t take anything away when you close the book, because there are no parts of the stories that can be transplanted.

The reason why I wanted to read this book to the end was the “Creation Perspective” at the end of each chapter. It does not put any polish on the interviewed companies, and is even quite rude.

The most typical one is the chapter Xinhua (opens in a new tab). Xinhua is the king of stocks, with a global BMC chip market share of 70% and a compound growth rate of 35% over the past two decades. No matter how you look at it, it is material that can be directly written into a legend. But the “creation view” makes two direct cuts: the first one says IC Because the winning rate of independent development is too high in the design industry, most of them only use internal growth as their right foot. As a result, “if you just start from a very successful today to a fairly certain tomorrow, by the time tomorrow sees the day after tomorrow, others may have already rushed in.” Many industry players have become a generation of boxing champions. The second blow is more direct, pointing out that Xinhua’s policy of allocating 90% of its earnings as cash dividends has invisibly limited its options for large-scale capital transformation. It is recommended that the management team and the board of directors conduct a comprehensive review.

Saying “Your dividend policy should be changed” to a company whose stock price is worth more than a thousand dollars is not common in Taiwanese business publications. What’s even more rare is that Lin Hongming himself admitted in the Q&A: “Because our interest rate is too high and our cash position is accumulated very slowly, we lack the capital for mergers and acquisitions.”

Only when a book is willing to juxtapose the interviewee’s self-acknowledgment with external doubts does the reader have a chance to learn. This is the biggest difference between it and corporate annual reports.

When I read this book, I happened to be stuck at a turning point.

The book was released on August 20, 2026. When I read it, Taiwan was in a position where signals were very confusing.

There is indeed good news. Taiwan signed the Taiwan-US Investment MOU and Reciprocal Trade Agreement earlier this year, becoming the first country in the world to obtain preferential treatment under Section 232 of the United States. In the Polysilicon 232 announcement signed by Trump on August 6, the 15% non-superimposed MFN tax rate is also applicable to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the European Union. The Executive Yuan assesses that the export of solar energy industry only accounts for 1%, and the impact is limited; because semiconductor silicon wafer companies have already invested in the United States, they can apply tax-free quotas and material exemption lists according to the MOU.

But if you zoom out a little further, the picture doesn’t look that good. The information electronics industry will contribute as much as 85% to Taiwan’s economic growth in 2025, with traditional industries and domestic service sectors barely sharing in this growth. Lu Mingguang pointed out in the recommendation preface that AI and semiconductor supply chains have accounted for more than 70% of Taiwan’s stock market value, and bluntly said: “If only a few star industries are allowed to carry the future of Taiwan’s economy, this road will not go far and will not be stable.” About 40 companies applied for listing this year, of which more than 15 are related to the AI ​​supply chain, accounting for more than 40%, which is higher than 33% in 2025 and 29% in 2024. Resources, talents, and funds continue to flow in the same direction.

In other words, Taiwan has temporarily defended the tariff barrier, but it has defended its entry qualifications, not its ranking. What is really squeezing traditional industries and small and medium-sized enterprises is the structural differentiation of funds and talents being siphoned off by a single industry. The Ministry of Economic Affairs has prepared a budget of 10.9 billion in 2026 to support the transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises. Whether this money can be effective depends on whether the enterprises themselves are willing to extend their hands. KPMG’s survey has long talked about the other side of the same thing: More than half of companies say they want to introduce AI, but only more than 10% have actually implemented it.

The phrase “the gap between knowledge and practice” in the book has a completely different weight when read at this time.

Three really changed to my place

1. Treat “the day after tomorrow” as today’s work item

Huang Rican has been promoting “looking forward to the day after tomorrow”. I originally thought this was just another word for “long-termism” (https://www.vista.tw/blog/advanced-thinking-ai-leverage), but after reading Xinhua’s chapter, I realized it wasn’t.

The difference is that “tomorrow” and “the day after tomorrow” are two different decision-making qualities. From today to tomorrow, we rely on extending existing advantages. The winning rate is high, the resistance is small, and it gives a sense of accomplishment. The problem is that this high winning rate will crowd out all other options. When the market takes shape the day after tomorrow, you will not have a ticket in your hand.

I’ve done this myself. If the content goes well, we will keep doing it; if the course response is good, we will keep teaching. Each step is rational, but together they lock yourself into a road that becomes increasingly narrow. Xinhua’s approach is to clearly allocate resources: it will first invest nearly a year in research and judge whether it is feasible before proceeding. In 2018, it established 100%-owned Kubola to take over the second product line. At the end of 2025, it will officially divide and transfer the real-world remote management business. In addition, Xie Chengru, the former general manager of Intel Innovation Technology, will be appointed as the general manager.

The point is not what products they have made, but the fact that they have turned the acquired products into an organizational unit that has people responsible for it, a budget, and a schedule. It is not an idea that the boss occasionally mentions.

2. “Why do you have to do it yourself?”

The thing I copied the most from the book is Huatai Hotel Group (opens in a new tab) CEO Chen Jiongfu said: “Ordinary people are easily bound by their own frameworks. In fact, there are many different resources out there. Why do you have to do it yourself? Why not ask for outside help? This is not just communication and brainstorming; sometimes, asking for outside help may also prove that you are right.”

Huang Rican compared corporate growth to two feet: internal growth is the right foot, and external mergers and acquisitions, alliances, and equity investments are the left foot. Small and medium-sized enterprises in Taiwan generally have well-developed right foot muscles and severe left foot atrophy, because they feel most at ease doing everything themselves.

I run a one-person company, which is incomparable in scale to any in the book, but the problem is exactly the same. I don’t have the capital for mergers and acquisitions, but I have external resources such as alliances, outsourcing, communities, and AI. My biggest progress in the past few years was almost not something I figured out by myself, but something that happened after I found the right person to chat with (https://www.vista.tw/blog/ai-era-high-value-networking) or handed over a certain link.

The real value of Chen Jiongfu’s words lies in the second half: asking for outside help may prove that you are right. Many bosses don’t dare to ask because they are afraid of being rejected; but the price of not asking is that you can only gamble with your own confidence.

3. The degree of crowding of the track is more important than the size of the track

Ruiyi Optoelectronics (opens in a new tab) Chairman Wang Yuchao said: “I hope to choose a less crowded track.” 404 Technology (opens in a new tab)’s strategy is described in the book as “giving up the ocean to defend the pond.” Chen Tianshun put it more clearly: “If you sacrifice your original profitability and lose your original sense of accomplishment in order to increase your revenue, then that is not the direction that everyone wants to pursue.” NetQin Information (opens in a new tab)’s Liao Changjian made the positioning almost formulaic: “The price is in the mid-price range, and the quality is mid-to-high-end. There will always be a group of people in the market who need good things, but are unwilling to pay the most expensive price.”

Taken together, these three paragraphs actually overturn a premise that many people take for granted: a good strategy equals choosing a large enough market.

no. A good strategy is to find a position that you can win and then hold after winning. Qincheng Xingye (opens in a new tab) What Chairman Chen Meiqi said, “I often say that we are No tech, Low tech, we just focus on doing one thing. This industry requires enthusiasm and patience, a warm heart and a dark hand.” is talking about the same thing. Difference does not come from technical content, but from the fact that others find it troublesome and don’t want to do it, but you have been willing to do it for 20 years.

My reservations

Books certainly have their limitations, and I think they’re worth spelling out.

First, these 15 families all survived. The interview subjects are companies that have successfully transformed. No matter how sharp the “creation perspective” is, it is also sharp for survivors. The really scarce information is about those cases where they lost all their money by changing tracks for the wrong ones, and those bosses usually won’t be interviewed. Readers have to make up for this deduction themselves: the methods in the book seem to be effective, partly because we can only see the effective ones. As for What will happen if you miss the strategic turning point, you have to find it in other books.

Second, the prerequisite for “old stems to grow new branches” is that you must first have old stems. This is actually admitted honestly in the book, right in the chapter of Xinhua: “If you don’t have a strong cash cow, it is dangerous to develop an unlimited game.” Only when the cash flow can be sustained can the board of directors tolerate R&D that has gone down many wrong paths; companies that cannot sustain it will have their budget cut in the first year.

Therefore, the readers this book is really suitable for are those operators who are still making money in their own business, but have already smelled the danger. As for those whose careers are already bleeding, this book does not give you a solution, but a reminder that you should have started three years earlier.

However, the two chapters of the Hautong Farmers Association and Ruji Food somewhat balance this impression. Neither the century-old farmers’ association nor the fresh food suppliers that came from family factories relied on abundant capital to turn themselves around. It can be seen that resources are variables, not thresholds.

The purchase link for this book is here: Enterprise Renaissance 3: Taiwan’s New Track (opens in a new tab).

Three things you can do after reading this

Guo Yiling asked a good question in her recommendation: “If we started over today, would we still run this company in the same way we do now?”

It’s a powerful question, but it’s so big that you can think about it for a long time without doing anything about it. I changed it into three versions that I can figure out the answer to this afternoon:

1. How much of your revenue this year comes from products or services that existed five years ago? More than 80% means that your right foot has been walking for five years and your left foot has not moved.
2. When was the last time you had a serious discussion about strategy with someone outside your company? This is not the kind of pleasantries with colleagues, but the kind of discussion where you are willing to let the other party poke your sore spots. If you can’t remember, your judgment has been fermenting in the stratosphere for a long time.
3. If your largest customer cuts orders by 50% next year, do you have a second leg? If not, this is your work project, and it needs a name, a person in charge, and a budget. My own answers to these three questions are not perfect, which is also my biggest gain after reading this book: it did not make me feel excited, but made me a little restless. For a business book, this is probably the best effect.

When reading “Amazon’s Digital Growth Mindset”, I also remembered a similar sentence: The most common mistake made in corporate transformation is to treat it as a project that can be handed over after it is completed.

Transformation is never about changing a track, but rather acknowledging that the winning method you were originally familiar with has expired. What makes most companies stuck is not that they can’t find a new path, but that they are reluctant to admit that the old path has come to an end.