When strategic recovery requires more than cost cutting
How turnaround strategies can rebuild competitive position by resetting the portfolio, operating priorities and sources of future growth.
Read articleRelated macro
Business strategy
Define business strategy through rigorous choices on growth, positioning, portfolios, resources and execution.
Discover the macroEditorial overview
Articles
Strategy in a world of overlapping disruptions
How leaders can make sharper choices on where to compete, where to invest and what to stop when multiple structural shifts hit at once.
Read articleFocus
Which uncertainty is worth paying to resolve?
Early R&D should create knowledge that changes future choices, not simply advance projects because resources have already been committed.
What has to be true for this business to work?
The most useful venture plan identifies the small number of assumptions whose failure would make the opportunity economically or strategically unattractive.
Strategic challenges
Innovation portfolios rarely fail from a shortage of ideas
The harder problem is concentrating enough talent and capital behind a limited number of opportunities to generate meaningful evidence.
Industry boundaries are becoming less reliable
Technology, convergence and new business models increasingly allow competitors from adjacent sectors to enter established value pools.
POV
The best position today may sit in the wrong part of tomorrow's value chain
Strong execution cannot preserve advantage indefinitely when the underlying structure determining value capture is moving elsewhere.
A feature request is evidence, not strategy
Building what customers ask for can improve a product while gradually destroying the differentiation that gave them a reason to choose it.
Strategic impact
Portfolio roles should determine investment
A growth product, retention product and harvesting product should not receive resources according to the same assumptions or success criteria.
Evidence should determine when capital increases
Staged validation makes it possible to expand commitment only after the assumptions carrying the greatest risk have been tested.
What we observe
Large accounts can hide weak economics
We frequently see strategic importance assigned according to revenue while complexity, concessions and servicing requirements quietly erode value.
Corporate ventures often inherit too much of the parent
We frequently see new businesses constrained by processes, economics and incentives designed for an established operation rather than a venture.