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 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.
Why does this business belong in the portfolio?
Ownership should have a strategic rationale beyond history, reported revenue or the cost and inconvenience of changing the portfolio.
Strategic challenges
Most markets contain more claims than actual differentiation
Competitors frequently converge on similar promises because communication evolves faster than the underlying business model or capabilities.
Advantage is always relative
A capability creates competitive advantage only when its value, scarcity and economics remain superior to the alternatives rivals can deploy.
POV
Recurring revenue is not automatically better revenue
Predictability has little strategic value when retention is weak, servicing costs are high or the model transfers excessive risk to the provider.
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
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.
Format is a strategic variable
Store size, assortment, service model and location type can change capital intensity, customer missions and network economics.
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.
Companies often model markets without modelling reactions
We frequently see strategies built around expected customer outcomes while competitor retaliation, imitation and repositioning remain implicit.