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
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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What still deserves to be saved?
Recovery becomes possible when management distinguishes valuable businesses and capabilities from activities preserved mainly through history or optimism.
Why should the customer choose you instead?
A positioning strategy becomes meaningful only when the answer changes customer preference under realistic competitive conditions.
Strategic challenges
Time changes the economics of strategic choice
Options that are attractive early in a decline can disappear as cash, customer confidence and organisational capacity deteriorate.
A good idea is not yet a business
Customer enthusiasm can coexist with weak pricing, expensive acquisition or an operating model that becomes uneconomic at scale.
POV
Scale does not rescue weak unit economics
A venture that loses value with every additional customer has a business-model problem, not a growth problem.
A feature request is evidence, not strategy
Building what customers ask for can improve a product while gradually destroying the differentiation that gave them a reason to choose it.
Strategic impact
Trade-offs make positioning stronger
Choosing which customers, attributes or economics not to optimise can create a more coherent and defensible basis for advantage.
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
Corporate ventures often inherit too much of the parent
We frequently see new businesses constrained by processes, economics and incentives designed for an established operation rather than a venture.
Strategic portfolios rarely stop enough work
We frequently see new priorities added without removing initiatives whose original rationale has weakened or disappeared.