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.
Read articleFocus
Which customer problem deserves another year of investment?
Product resources are scarce, making the value and strategic importance of the problem more consequential than the length of the feature backlog.
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.
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.
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.
On time and on budget can still be strategic failure
Perfect delivery creates little value when the initiative solves the wrong problem or the assumptions connecting it to strategy are false.
Strategic impact
Research needs different economics from mature businesses
Demanding conventional certainty too early can eliminate important options before the technical and commercial questions are answerable.
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.
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.
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.