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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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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Which customer problem deserves another year of investment?
Product resources are scarce, making the value and strategic importance of the problem more consequential than the length of the feature backlog.
Which consumers are actually worth building for?
A large segment can still be strategically unattractive when acquisition cost, price sensitivity or weak retention undermine its economics.
Strategic challenges
A franchise model has two customers
The consumer proposition must remain attractive while the economics and operating model also work for the franchisee.
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
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.
Not every customer should want you
A B2B strategy becomes stronger when the value proposition is distinctive enough to be highly relevant to some customers and deliberately less relevant to others.
Strategic impact
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.
Trade-offs make positioning stronger
Choosing which customers, attributes or economics not to optimise can create a more coherent and defensible basis for advantage.
What we observe
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.
Large accounts can hide weak economics
We frequently see strategic importance assigned according to revenue while complexity, concessions and servicing requirements quietly erode value.