Strategy Blog
Knowing When Competitive Advantage is Real
Thinking a company has a competitive advantage and knowing it has one, can sometimes be different. ‘A rising tide floats all boats’ and thus a company with rising sales, loyal customers and healthy profit doesn’t always mean it’s leveraging competitive advantages....
read moreWhat is strategy?
As a strategist, you get asked this a lot. When I left business school over two-decades ago the answer seemed clear – a response I’m sure that was peppered with the latest buzz words and overly complicated thinking. And now? The same question is answered with the...
read moreCreating Competitive Differentiation
Head-to-head competition is rarely advisable. Sooner or later competitive focus moves to price and both parties suffer materially: we should never assume our counterparts will only act rationally and never unthinkingly. Avoiding head-to-head competition relies on...
read moreWhy Trying to be the Best at Everything is Wrong
Intuitively, we think getting our company to be the best at everything it does is right. Why wouldn’t it be? But business reality, especially during the past ten-years, tells us no company has reached, let alone sustained this achievement. Paradoxically, and perhaps...
read moreResponding to Low-Cost and Disruptive Business Models: When and How
The internet has helped reduce traditional barriers to entry, enabling new entrants to burst onto the scene, forge a bridgehead into the incumbent’s customer-base, target business model weakness and erode product margins. Undeniably, this is true in many instances but...
read moreCreating Strategic Objectives
Strategic business objectives are not the same as functional or individual performance objectives. Distinguishing characteristics set them apart, most notably their direct relationship with the current and future health and performance of the company. Creating...
read moreDiversification: Making Successful Adjacency Market Moves
Business Leaders are tempted to diversify the company by moving into apparently similar adjacency markets, with varying degrees of success. What seemed familiar or easy to do turned out to be very different in hindsight and so what characteristics of adjacency moves...
read moreCommoditisation: Changing before you must
Commoditisation in many markets is symbolised by a gradual erosion in the buyer’s perception of the differences between products/ services from multiple suppliers in a defined procurement category – encouraging buyers to focus on price. In formulating the right...
read moreFive Focus Areas to Drive Improved Performance
Ultimately, the desired outcome from any given company strategy is increased revenue and/or reduced operating cost but whilst there are many ways to achieve this, Business Leaders should initially focus on five key areas to determine the thrust of their improvement...
read moreStrategy: Seeing the Big Picture
Strategy is about looking beyond the immediate to do list or this quarter’s financial plan and seeing the whole picture and the way things really are, not the way you’d like them to be. Seeing the big picture is critical in creating successful strategy and probably...
read moreFive Thinking Skills Every Strategist Needs
Developing evidenced-based strategy requires a straightforward approach to discovering the signal in the noise. Life would be easier if everything we needed to know in solving a client problem was listed neatly and orderly in a single spreadsheet; Unfortunately,...
read moreLean development of new products significantly reduces risk
You no longer need to ‘bet the farm’ on getting everything right at the start and committing to a large front-ended budget. It’s extremely rare to know all the answers at the start. Whilst it’s common to find business failure and budget overspend and even more common...
read more