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.
Read articleFocus
Where does the industry actually make money?
Revenue and market share can obscure substantial differences in returns across activities, customer groups and positions in the value chain.
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
Stakeholders do not evaluate companies from the same starting point
A message that reassures investors may create concern among employees, regulators or communities if underlying interests are not understood.
Business models fail through interactions, not isolated components
Pricing, channels, delivery and cost structure can each appear rational while producing unattractive economics when combined.
POV
Winning every competitive battle can destroy the market
A company can gain share and still lose economically when rivalry forces pricing, investment or service levels beyond sustainable returns.
Alignment is not agreement on a slide deck
The real test of enterprise strategy is whether business units make different decisions because the common strategic direction exists.
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.
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
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.
Strategic portfolios rarely stop enough work
We frequently see new priorities added without removing initiatives whose original rationale has weakened or disappeared.