Business Strategy
How comprehensive is your strategy? Is it evidence-based? How well communicated is it?
· Are your goals clear and consistent with your vision?
· Did you include diverse stakeholders to build and test your strategy?
· Are your core values authentic to support the aptitudes and principles to deliver on your vision?
· Is the operating framework and capabilities in place to sustain execution and iteration?
· Are the management systems in place to enable insightful decisions and allocate resources well?
· Does the whole workforce understand and appreciate the strategy and recognize how their role supports it?
· Is the organization agile and able to pivot if needed?
Strategic management is the process of defining desired outcomes, and deciding how the company will use resources to achieve them. Strategic management combines every phase of strategy, from planning to implementation and iteration answering both reflective questions about your business: 'where are we going, and why?' and the practical questions, like 'how will we get there?
Business owners and leadership teams clarify vision, think about where they are, and should be. How effectively, and by what process can they grow value, and what capabilities and management systems are needed to succeed.
We help business owners and leadership teams achieve desired outcomes.
We use descriptive, predictive and prescriptive technology tools to aid all elements of strategy management and execution.
Exponential technologies have increased the speed at which business disruption occurs. They underpin the phenomenon of category kings and steady stream of massive IPOs. Modern business practices have to some degree rendered many of the strategy formation frameworks used over the past several decades far less applicable in today’s economies.
Balanced Scorecard, Ansoff Matrix, Value Disciplines, and a myriad of others nuanced models apply to certain cases, but we believe Strategy cascade - which informs our approach, operating model ROSE℠, and application with clients - is most effective.
Developed and refined by P&G and described in the book Playing to Win. The five elements and disciplines necessary apply to any company and evolving strategy. The elements of cascade are iteratively developed, and in combination work together for tangible strategy and real execution, beyond just a plan.
Defining and clarifying aspirations are the initial steps of strategy – The desired future state of the business. This provides context around strategy, framing execution footprint, and anchoring decisions. It spans the mission, vision, core values, capabilities and alignment. It extends beyond the participation in chosen markets and poses the question what does out-performing the competition look like - for both your business and client avatar.Aspirations are a first step in strategy formation.
Where to play makes choices about geography, customers, products or services, industries and within those sectors, where you have the best chance to dominate or at least create high value. Strategy is as much about saying no. Here is where you decide to avoid, at least for now, certain segments. Just because area to compete in seems attractive does not mean you should target it. Conversely, just because a space is already crowded with competitors or has a less demand doesn’t mean you should avoid it. Assess each segment in terms of what value differentiation you can bring.
With aspirations and initial decisions about where to play, the following steps are to define the economic/monetization model and how to create more value than competitors - Primary and secondary market research drives data necessary to inform and insight. Market trends, technology, demographics and consumer preferences. Unattractive markets can become highly attractive. Category evolution is a prime example - think hospitality and Airbnb, transport and Uber.Finally, consider internal functions and business models as well as external competitive environments. Your intangible assets and support functions may be the real key to value creation.
Capabilities are the underpinning suite of activities, systems, processes, assets, data, skills, culture, relationships, business models and company practices that combine to create and deliver value. P&G’s five selected capabilities were customer understanding, brand building, innovating, leveraging partners and global scale to anchor underpin and build their strategy. P&G selected prioritized these activities and worked hard to ensure resources were reliably focused, investment channeled to build them to create a company-level activity system.
Timely and productive resource allocation decisions are imperative. Ignoring this discipline is a crack in the foundation and will manifest as a systemic weakness. Effective strategy requires iteration; data, analysis, reporting, administration, culture, quality, skill development, control systems, talent optimization, communication and decision- making frameworks.
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