Strategic Clarity

Creating better products with iterative improvements

Outstanding performance was once the hallmark of a great company. Year after year, it delivered exceptional total shareholder return through differentiated products or services while increasing scale and cost efficiency. No small feat.

Growth outperformers prioritize expansion into business areas where they have a ‘natural ownership’ advantage.

Customer experience is increasingly critical for industrial-services businesses—and the bar is rising. Here’s how to exceed it.

Our guest today shows how the best companies achieve more by doing less. At a time when rapid technological change and global competition conspire to upend traditional ways of doing business, these companies pursue radically simplified strategies.

Embedding design thinking, methods, and tools from the outset of ecosystem development will help companies produce integrated ecosystem offerings that delight customers, stave off threats, and create new sources of value.

Not only did they save the business but gave better returns to their investors over the past decade

As we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, companies will need to drive short-term results while also rethinking strategy amid seismic shifts in competitive environments and ways of working. It’s not strategy vs. execution; it’s strategy and execution with the right balance in the right timeframes. New CEOs, in particular, can struggle with this balance.

Identity Wind Tunneling is an organizational foresight method to understand, test, and manage multiple, current organizational identities using scenarios to consequently arrive at a strategic identity that either clarifies or reimagines the identity of the organization.

I recently finished reading Simon Wardley’s book, which describes a novel mapping technique that he invented. As it was pretty dense and took me a long time to get through, I’m going to describe what I got out of it, both as a way to jog my memory and to hopefully offer value to others.

Leaders focus on the parts rather than the whole.

As they deal with a business landscape that is evolving constantly, rapidly, and unpredictably, executives all over the world are full of questions about change: How much? How fast? How sustainable? And sometimes just How? They can’t hope to answer those questions unless they understand their companies’ capacity for change—but they’ve lacked good tools for measuring that.

There is a dramatic change that occurs when a business evolves from looking to its competitors for cues as to how to grow to looking to its customers and their needs. They suddenly change from being a follower chasing what everyone else is doing to being the one that is setting the next level of customer value and the one who is chased. It starts with the way you think about growth, which then becomes the catalyst of the capital value of your business.

Companies that integrate creativity, analytics, and purpose are delivering at least two times the growth of their peers.

From project-based work to a lack of hierarchy, the way people work is changing fast. Organizations that plan for the postpandemic world are better able to deliver value—even amid uncertainty.

The companies that know their customers best aren’t always the companies that need to change the way food and products are developed.

How should IKEA adapt to big internal and external changes, while staying true to its core values?

Organizations should challenge their pre-pandemic assumptions about conducting business digitally.

Companies that master the deployment of intangibles investment will be well positioned to outperform their peers.

In my previous blog, we called on all (aspiring) customer-obsessed companies to balance the value of their customers with the value they deliver for their customers. This follow-up blog will introduce the three steps for how to do that, along with a new value metrics framework.