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.
Read articleRelated macro
Business strategy
Define business strategy through rigorous choices on growth, positioning, portfolios, resources and execution.
Discover the macroEditorial overview
Articles
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.
Read articleFocus
Who actually needs to believe your corporate story?
Corporate positioning becomes strategic when it is designed around stakeholders whose choices materially affect the company's ability to execute.
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
Execution failure often begins with strategy translation
Broad priorities become ambiguous initiatives when organisations do not define what must materially change for the strategy to work.
The buyer is rarely one person
Economic users, technical evaluators, procurement and executives can value different outcomes and exercise influence at different stages.
POV
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.
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
Synergy must exceed the cost of complexity
Shared customers, capabilities or infrastructure create value only when their benefits outweigh coordination, compromise and managerial overhead.
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
Strategic plans often contain decisions nobody actually made
We frequently see portfolios of initiatives presented as strategy without explicit choices about markets, advantage, economics or trade-offs.
Companies often redesign the proposition but preserve the economics
We frequently see new offers forced through legacy revenue, channel and operating models that undermine their intended advantage.