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.
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Business strategy
Define business strategy through rigorous choices on growth, positioning, portfolios, resources and execution.
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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.
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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.
What have you actually proven?
Revenue, users and funding can all create confidence without demonstrating that demand, retention and economics are sufficiently repeatable to support scale.
Strategic challenges
Advantage is always relative
A capability creates competitive advantage only when its value, scarcity and economics remain superior to the alternatives rivals can deploy.
Stakeholders do not evaluate companies from the same starting point
A message that reassures investors may create concern among employees, regulators or communities if underlying interests are not understood.
POV
Scaling is not the reward for growth
Scale should follow evidence that the underlying system becomes stronger, not merely larger, as customers and complexity increase.
Winning every competitive battle can destroy the market
A company can gain share and still lose economically when rivalry forces pricing, investment or service levels beyond sustainable returns.
Strategic impact
The strongest move may change the game
Competitive strategy can create more value by altering customer choice, economics or market structure than by outperforming rivals on established terms.
Customer value and supplier value are not the same thing
A proposition can create substantial customer benefit while weak differentiation or bargaining power prevents the supplier from capturing much of it.
What we observe
Strategic plans often contain decisions nobody actually made
We frequently see portfolios of initiatives presented as strategy without explicit choices about markets, advantage, economics or trade-offs.
Cost reduction often reaches the wrong conclusion first
We frequently see visible expenses cut rapidly while structural complexity and economically weak products or customers remain untouched.