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
Designing the next business model before the current one plateaus
How companies can identify new value pools and build business models that combine differentiated customer value with scalable economics.
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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.
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.
Time changes the economics of strategic choice
Options that are attractive early in a decline can disappear as cash, customer confidence and organisational capacity deteriorate.
POV
On time and on budget can still be strategic failure
Perfect delivery creates little value when the initiative solves the wrong problem or the assumptions connecting it to strategy are false.
If competitors can copy the claim, the claim is not the advantage
Defensible positioning must eventually connect to capabilities, economics, assets or choices that are harder to replicate than language.
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.
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.
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.
Companies often benchmark peers instead of questioning the industry model
We frequently see strategy focused on outperforming incumbents while deeper changes are altering where future profit will be created.