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.
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What has to be true for this business to work?
The most useful venture plan identifies the small number of assumptions whose failure would make the opportunity economically or strategically unattractive.
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
Capital allocation is corporate strategy in its most tangible form
Budgets reveal which businesses the organisation actually believes in more clearly than portfolio narratives or strategic aspirations.
Innovation portfolios rarely fail from a shortage of ideas
The harder problem is concentrating enough talent and capital behind a limited number of opportunities to generate meaningful evidence.
POV
The best position today may sit in the wrong part of tomorrow's value chain
Strong execution cannot preserve advantage indefinitely when the underlying structure determining value capture is moving elsewhere.
Maximum coverage is not maximum distribution advantage
A smaller, more productive network can create greater strategic value than ubiquitous availability built on weak economics and limited control.
Strategic impact
Credibility comes from consistency between words and decisions
Stakeholders infer corporate priorities from investment, incentives and behaviour long before they accept the language used to describe them.
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.
What we observe
Weak businesses are often protected by portfolio averages
We frequently see consolidated performance obscure businesses that consume capital and attention without a credible path to attractive returns.
Companies often measure distribution by reach instead of productivity
We frequently see outlet counts and geographic coverage expand while revenue density, margin quality and partner economics deteriorate.