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
Where does the business actually capture value?
Creating significant customer value does not guarantee attractive economics when suppliers, channels or customers capture a disproportionate share.
Where exactly is the value supposed to appear?
Every strategic initiative should have a credible path from action to operational outcome and from that outcome to measurable economic value.
Strategic challenges
Scale changes the economics of customer access
As distribution expands, intermediary margins, inventory requirements and service costs can become as important as underlying product demand.
Execution failure often begins with strategy translation
Broad priorities become ambiguous initiatives when organisations do not define what must materially change for the strategy to work.
POV
You cannot cut your way back to relevance
Cost discipline can create time, but sustainable recovery requires a business that customers still value and that can compete economically.
Innovation theatre begins where strategic choice ends
A large pipeline of experiments is not evidence of innovation strength when the organisation cannot explain which future advantages it is trying to build.
Strategic impact
Strategic choices should change resource allocation
A strategy that leaves investment, talent and management attention essentially unchanged may be describing ambition rather than directing action.
Structural change redistributes advantage
A shift in regulation, technology or bargaining power can move economic value between participants without changing total industry demand.
What we observe
Roadmaps often preserve decisions nobody remembers making
We frequently see development capacity committed to accumulated requests without a current strategic rationale for why those priorities still matter.
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.