Strategic Clarity

We’ve seen how false claims on the internet can be damaging for politicians and for society at large, but businesses are at risk, too.

To control the fate of your business, resist the temptation to grow dependent on the many intermediaries who’d like to sit between you and your customers.

Since competitive strategy is essentially about being different, a company’s differentiated position is enabled by activities designed to deliver that differentiation — in brand, in product and in service to customers.

While using customer journeys to guide what teams build and how they operate is common practice, small differences in approach produce vastly different results. But today, as we enter a new stage of profound change, those differences will be more important than ever to business performance. The author offers three simple but critical factors that will determine whether your post-pandemic customer journeys will help amplify or impede business growth.

I believe that strategic management faces an attractive, back-to-basics opportunity. By simplifying strategy—by selecting fewer initiatives with greater impact—we can make it more powerful. In this article, I describe an easy-to-use framework called value-based strategy, which gives executives a common language for evaluating strategic initiatives and developing a holistic view of the many activities taking place within their organizations.

The strength of purpose, values, and mission

The traits that nurtured your main growth engine can bring new success beyond the core.

Business leaders can better assess and strengthen analytical frameworks using seven evaluation criteria.

We’re living in a communication insurgency and to be effective, you should be a piece of the new world request. Today individuals convey progressively. Social networks are not difficult to utilize, totally free, and arrive at each human in the world with a web association, so it’s no big surprise that billions of individuals around the planet have inclined toward them.

3 broad areas to explore where your ideal customer may be primed to buy

Capitalism, as Peter Drucker remarked in 1954, is in the first instance about creating value for customers. The significance of his dictum becomes ever more important in the fast-changing customer-centric marketplace of the 21st century.

When you think about Xiaomi, you mind probably goes to smartphones, but what’s less known is that the company originally entered the fiercely competitive smartphone market without offering a phone. When Xiaomi launched in 2010, it only offered a free Android-based OS. But within seven years, it became one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, reaching $15 billion in revenue. In this article, based on interviews with top executives, the authors discuss how Xiaomi was able to grow so explosively, the strategies it used, and what other companies can learn from Xiaomi’s rise.

Innovators must prepare for their journey like adventurers: studying the conditions and being prepared to respond to dynamic elements along their path.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee, professor at Harvard Business School, says many organizations spend so much energy on strategy that it overwhelms with conflicting priorities. Instead, he argues companies should simplify and focus on two value drivers: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. By aligning strategic initiatives on these alone, leaders make their workers’ jobs less complicated and also improve customer experiences.

How the K-pop band keeps its fans, aka, the Army, delighted and growing, according to a marketing strategist.

In his seminal book, Crowds and Power, Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti writes about the “freedom and relief” that the experience of “becoming one with the crowd” provides to individuals otherwise unconnected to one another.

Clarins Group’s organizational experiment during the pandemic shows that large companies can adapt and become more flexible when it matters most.

Throughout the pandemic, companies worked to rapidly adjust their business models to be more resilient and competitive in the face of uncertain economic recovery. As companies now build back, how can they assess which business model changes will enable the company to become genuinely more resilient and sustainable over time?

For 30 years, the business sold little else besides produce, canned tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, condiments, minced meats, and of course, soups. Business was good, but there was nothing “radically different” about these products. Canning had been widely accepted as a method for sealing food since the early 1800s, and even when pasteurization was invented in 1864, fresh foods were difficult products to scale. Soup, for example, while cheap to make (its primary ingredient being water), was still heavy and expensive to ship.

What drives big, breakthrough innovations? Often it’s constraints — limitations that force designers to rethink the whole problem and come up with something completely new to address it. The caveat here is that certain constraints spur big thinking, while others tamp it down. Limiting outcomes (a new product needs to cost 10% what it’s competitors do) or time (design this product in nine months) or both creates specific bounds for designers, but leaves the path they take to reach this goal wide open, forcing them to consider bold new solutions. Most leaders, however, constrain budget and risk. They tell teams their innovation must cost no more than a certain amount — a figure based on assumptions about what kind solution the team will deliver — or communicate to the team, “don’t do anything too risky, especially something that might cannibalize existing business.”