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.
What happens after your competitor responds?
A strategically attractive move can become economically destructive when the likely reactions of rivals are excluded from the decision.
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.
Most markets contain more claims than actual differentiation
Competitors frequently converge on similar promises because communication evolves faster than the underlying business model or capabilities.
POV
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.
Not every customer should want you
A B2B strategy becomes stronger when the value proposition is distinctive enough to be highly relevant to some customers and deliberately less relevant to others.
Strategic impact
Format is a strategic variable
Store size, assortment, service model and location type can change capital intensity, customer missions and network economics.
Evidence should determine when capital increases
Staged validation makes it possible to expand commitment only after the assumptions carrying the greatest risk have been tested.
What we observe
Companies often confuse uniqueness with relevance
We frequently see businesses emphasise differences customers can recognise but have little reason to value or pay for.
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.