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
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.
Where does the business actually capture value?
Creating significant customer value does not guarantee attractive economics when suppliers, channels or customers capture a disproportionate share.
Strategic challenges
The buyer is rarely one person
Economic users, technical evaluators, procurement and executives can value different outcomes and exercise influence at different stages.
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
Scaling is not the reward for growth
Scale should follow evidence that the underlying system becomes stronger, not merely larger, as customers and complexity increase.
Innovation theatre begins where strategic choice ends
A large pipeline of experiments is not evidence of innovation strength when the organisation cannot explain which future advantages it is trying to build.
Strategic impact
The next constraint matters more than the last milestone
A company that solved product-market fit may immediately encounter distribution, economics, leadership or operational constraints.
Format is a strategic variable
Store size, assortment, service model and location type can change capital intensity, customer missions and network economics.
What we observe
Segmentation often describes consumers without changing strategy
We frequently see detailed personas that create little guidance about which customers, occasions or economics should actually be prioritised.
Projects often survive because nobody defined the kill criteria
We frequently see R&D continue through organisational momentum even after the assumptions that originally justified it have weakened.