6 thoughts on “Blog; Strategy”

1. 

   http://www.businessweek.com/management/six-strategy-insights-rims-new-ceo-can-use-01242012.html

   SIX STRATEGY INSIGHTS RIM’s New CEO Can Use

   The usual moves won’t work when new technologies and rivals dramatically shake up the field

   Perhaps Thorsten Heins has longed to run a big, public company. But probably the dream didn’t look like this. Heins, the new CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), has been plucked from the company’s relatively obscure COO position to fill the giant shoes of two longtime co-CEOs as they depart at the behest of angry investors. Having pioneered the smartphone industry with its Blackberry, RIM is dangerously adrift. Apple changed the nature of a smartphone from a corporate to a consumer device, and RIM has failed to reinvent itself accordingly. Part of the problem is that the industry is still moving at warp speed, and the company has dwindling resources to deploy against innumerable innovation challenges. Surely, one of Heins’ first tasks is to think through a strategy to pull the company out of its current mess.

   One thing’s for sure: it would be unwise to rely on tried-and-true approaches that don’t fit the times. Trend lines, market sizing, and competitive benchmarks that served companies well during periods of gradual market evolution do little good in industries where new technologies create seismic shifts, demand is uncertain, and rivals emerge from left field.

   How can RIM (and other companies in the same boat) chart effective strategy in uncertainty? A look at root causes of failed and successful efforts gives a clear view.

   Strategic planning fails when: It has fuzzy objectives Why is the company writing a strategic plan? Is it to argue for resources, allocate budgets, create performance metrics, decide among customer targets, or other reasons? If executives don’t have a detailed view of what choices the strategic plan will inform, the document may not provide clear guidance when those calls need to get made. Equally, it will be too easy to cut-and-paste templates from previous years’ plans when the real need is for fresh thinking to underpin big decisions. Strategic plans are usually best when they focus on a handful of critical issues, not when they churn out a list of 20 must-do’s that could have been written in any year, for any competitor in the industry.

   It involves too many people When a strategic plan needs to finely calibrate the moves of loosely controlled business units and achieve consensus, then it often makes sense to include a wide range of stakeholders in the discussions. Yet in turbulent times this is dysfunctional. Industry upheaval often calls for tough choices, and consensus will not be possible. Pretending that a collaborative process will gain alignment simply invites passive-aggressive behavior, with participants feigning assent while they try to undermine key decisions behind the scenes. The result may be a messy compromise that fails to provide the firm with the focus required. Heins should seek input from many sources, but he would do well to keep the most important meetings small.

   It is rushed Despite being faced with new and complex challenges, many businesses in turbulent industries devote too little time to strategic planning, often compressing the discussion into a single, marathon meeting. That is a big problem. It isn’t necessary to take several days out in the deep woods somewhere, but the process will be far more effective if it is staged over the course of several offsite meetings. Big decisions have to be framed, then informed by data, then thought through for execution. Clustering these steps into one meeting risks neglecting key details, or biasing discussions toward issues where data is readily at hand. Staging a handful of meetings over four to eight weeks gives time for needed research and reality checks.

   Successful strategic planning requires: Defining challenges A frank dialogue about strategy in uncertainty will usually produce a range of opinions. Dig deeper and you’ll find that the diversity of views usually corresponds with how executives frame the problem. Heins needs to pay attention up front to defining the challenges carefully. For RIM, is it the small base of application developers, or the lack of a handful of key applications? Is it Apple’s consumer appeal, or the declining influence of corporate IT managers? By aligning on the right issues, a team can focus on answering the questions that really matter and avoid meandering discussions.

   Identifying a clear destination Big companies often hate to make choices. Choice means that someone loses, and that creates political risk. Alas, during industry turmoil muddling through may be impossible. Frame strategic discussions around a mutually exclusive menu of choices tied directly to agreed definitions of the challenge. The leap from present circumstances to the chosen future state doesn’t need to occur overnight, but the destination has to be clear. RIM could opt to double down on the corporate market, broadening its business from device maker into fields such as mobile security services and bandwidth management. The company could merge with Dell. Alternatively, it could make the most of its strong position in emerging markets to focus on low-cost smartphones.

   Conceiving smart options Turbulent environments are characterized by uncertainty. It’s important to create strategic options through mechanisms such as partnering or incubating new business models. These moves require limited investment while providing critical hedges against unexpected changes in the marketplace. RIM has made a shoot-for-the-moon bet on a new operating system to be released near the end of 2012, but in the interim it might have brought out simple, rugged tablets tailored to corporate customers. The company did recently bring out a general interest tablet to poor reviews, but it might have more success with a device that aspires to do less but does it very well for key corporate accounts (much as its original Blackberry two-way pager did).

   Developing effective strategy in turbulent times requires breaking with old habits and having difficult discussions. A robust strategy is most important not when there’s smooth sailing but when big storms loom directly ahead.

   Posted by philworldwide | 13/11/2012, 11:22 pm
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2. 

   DEFINING THE OFFICE OF STRATEGY MANAGEMENT

   http://blog.vistage.com/business-strategy-and-management/defining-the-office-of-strategy-management/

   Many organizations do an adequate job strategic planning, only to see the effort go to waste as execution languishes – sometimes due to poor project management, lack of initiative ownership / accountability and political turf wars occurring within the business. Strategy governance is the secret weapon to combat such obstacles, but even then the approach taken with strategic plan oversight distinguishes the outcomes a great deal. Governance disconnected from business operations usually results in a powerless reporting function that does not help improve upon strategy execution. For a strategy governance organization to produce better than average results in execution, it requires the function to be well-integrated within the business and exist in a culture of accountability. It must offer process sophistication, planning maturity and have the authority to act. The best practice for closing that gap between strategy and execution is the establishment of a corporate-level Office of Strategy Management (OSM) – responsible for overseeing all strategy-related activities ranging from formulation to execution. This article describes such an office and examines role, function and benefit to an organization.

   What is an Office of Strategy Management?
   An Office of Strategy Management is usually organized at the corporate level to facilitate corporate strategic plan development and oversee implementation. We use the term “oversee” because execution of strategy must be accomplished in an integrated fashion throughout an organization and the OSM is not intended to do all of the work. The OSM’s role is not just strategy development, but also to be the major player in corporate strategic program coordination.

   The term Program Management Office (PMO) is related to an OSM in many ways, yet the OSM’s function can be much broader than managing programs and projects. A PMO is generally a group or department within an enterprise that defines and maintains standards for project management across the organization, seeking to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects. PMOs are generally the source of documentation, guidance and metrics on the practice of project management and execution. In that regard, a PMO’s standards might well serve the OSM – where managing programs and projects is part of the function the OSM provides, but not the primary purpose. Likewise, an OSM should be the source of documentation, guidance and metrics on the practice of strategic and operational planning practices. If PMO standards for project management exist already within the organization, an OSM should be leveraging those assets. If not, it most likely will step up to fill that gap. Perhaps the most important similarity between PMOs and an OSM relates to the form of PMO implementation where governing groups of related projects is part of that function’s scope. In this regard, a PMO’s program governance role is closely related to the OSM’s primary purpose and overlap might exist between the two.

   To conclude this point, the OSM performs a strategy governance function for strategic plan development and implementation. Central to governance are the concepts of leadership, authority, accountability, transparency and stewardship. Additional to this is the concept that the OSM serves as a “delivery arm” to ensure the efficient, effective and equitable allocation of funding is directed to strategy-aligned initiatives.

   How can an OSM be established and when does it become a requirement?
   So how does an OSM become a reality and when is one needed? The answer to the second question is the easiest to address. An OSM, whether it begins with a single individual or a small team, adds value to the CEO and executive team as soon as the organization begins to formally perform strategic planning. That’s because the executive team cannot be expected to manage the day-to-day execution details of strategy. Someone or some organizational function must do that.

   The answer to how an OSM is normally established varies, but typically may evolve from the initial appointment of a Chief Strategy Officer and grow organically as more resources are needed to keep up with the scope of the office. The strategy officer defines the job and sets the tone for what the OSM might someday be.
   A strategy officer is typically responsible for driving strategic planning and interacting with business units and functions during that process. A strategy officer should also provide support in operational planning by ensuring that business units have the knowledge they need and the tools required to develop tactical plans that support alignment with the corporate strategy.

   The strategy officer also normally serves as the glue that helps disparate business functions work better together. Through involvement in the corporate strategy development and then later involvement in operational planning, budgeting is attenuated with strategy and more importantly with fiscal operational plans.
   How? Enterprise, division, line-of-business and departmental budgets determine the resources that can be invested towards a strategy goal achievement. Goal timeframes may not be accomplishable if financial resources are too limited or, worse yet, do not exist in key areas of the enterprise ecosystem. During operational planning, financial constraints will begin to emerge and must be resolved. The strategy officer can work with the organization’s CFO to help in this regard. Sometimes that means that plans must be scaled back or adjusted to reflect the limits of capacity to meet goal objectives in certain areas of the organization without additional investment by the enterprise. In any case, finalized budget allocations allow the detailed aspects of the plan to be developed fully and be realistic with organizational capacity.

   Summary
   The Office of Strategy Management can be a very effective corporate function to help close that gap between strategy and execution. An OSM is usually responsible for overseeing all strategy-related activities ranging from formulation to execution. Whether an OSM begins as a single individual or is established initially as a small team, CEOs and executive teams can benefit by realizing improvements in strategy implementation. A such, an OSM can be initiated as soon as the organization begins to formally perform strategic planning.

   Posted by philworldwide | 03/12/2012, 10:17 pm
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3. 

   STRATEGY AND THE UNCERTAINTY EXCUSE
   http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/the_uncertainty_excuse.html

   When I ask business executives about their company’s strategy — or about an apparent lack thereof — they often respond that they can’t or won’t do strategy because their operating environment is changing so much. There isn’t enough certainty, they argue, to be able to do strategy effectively.

   This is an argument I hear particularly often in high-technology sectors. It is almost a mantra there, a badge of pride and superiority: “We run at breakneck speed in the world of high-tech and there isn’t time to stop and do strategy. It will emerge naturally over time.”

   The implication is that only boring corporate bureaucrats in large corporations, where the future is (apparently) certain, engage in strategy. Growth companies, it seems, have far more urgent things to do.
   I find this to be pretty interesting logic. Essentially, the argument is that the present it is too uncertain to make any strategic decisions about the future. However, at some future time, things will be certain enough to make choices.
   I really wonder what makes them think so. Life is and always has been uncertain. If we live in an uncertain, fast-moving, turbulent world today, why would it be any different a week, a month or a year from now? If the world is too uncertain to choose today, what is it about the future than will make things more certain? At some point, do we simply declare the world to be certain enough to make strategy choices? How will we know it is the day? What criteria will we use to decide the requisite level of certainty has been reached? Or will we simply put of choosing forever, because certainty is utterly unachievable at any stage?

   The danger, of course, is that while we are using uncertainty as an excuse to put off making strategic choices, the competition may be doing something else entirely. They may be strategizing their way to first mover advantages and positions that leave few if any attractive options in the market.

   What I generally observe about companies that say that it is too uncertain to do strategy, is that they complain after the fact about having been blindsided by something unexpected. Their narrative tends to be that when it happened, it was just too late to do anything constructive about it. The failure wasn’t at all their fault, because the industry is uncertain and this kind of stuff just happens naturally.

   This is beautifully self-sealing logic that absolves leaders completely from any responsibility. Leaders who use this logic ensure that they don’t acquire any useful lessons whatsoever from the experience. Because they have a narrative that says it wasn’t their fault, they don’t explore their actions. And when their company crashes and burns because it was beaten by some other company that actually had a strategy, these leaders go somewhere else and do the same thing all over again.

   In truth every company has a strategy. Whether it ‘does strategy’ explicitly or not, the choices that it makes on a daily basis result in the company operating on some part of the playing field (i.e. making a where-to-play choice) and competing there in some fashion (i.e. making a how-to-win choice). It matters not a whit whether the industry is highly uncertain, every company competing in it has a strategy.

   Without making an effort to ‘do strategy,’ though, a company runs the risk of its numerous daily choices having no coherence to them, of being contradictory across divisions and levels, and of amounting to very little of meaning. It doesn’t have to be so. But it continues to be so because these leaders don’t believe there is a better way.

   Posted by philworldwide | 09/01/2013, 10:52 am
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4. 

   SHAPE STRATEGY WITH SIMPLE RULES, NOT COMPLEX FRAMEWORKS

   http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/shape_strategy_with_simple_rul.html

   Successful companies shape their high-level strategies by relying not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. Managers in these organizations translate corporate objectives into a few straightforward guidelines that help employees make on-the-spot decisions and adapt to constantly shifting environments, while keeping the big picture in mind.

   Take the story of América Latina Logística (ALL). It illustrates how simple rules can help companies shape strategy in an uncertain environment. It also demonstrates that this approach can be useful in almost any setting, even a dilapidated freight railway in southern Brazil.

   In the late 1990s the government of Brazil privatized the country’s freight lines. After decades of neglect, the nation’s freight-rail infrastructure was run-down: Half the bridges needed repair; a fifth were on the verge of collapse. Twenty steam locomotives that were decades out-of-date were still in use. Rail accounted for only 20% of long-haul shipments in Brazil, compared with 80% in most countries.

   ALL was spun off from the Brazilian railway authority in 1997 to manage one of the country’s eight freight lines. Its new management team took over an organization that was bureaucratic, overstaffed, and bleeding cash. Transport on the line was so unreliable that crops in the areas it served were routinely left to rot in the fields during the harvest season. Middle managers were confused about what to do, and many pushed their local agendas at the expense of the company’s overall best interests.

   The team decided to adopt a simple-rules approach to the work ahead. This helped ALL’s executives do four things: achieve alignment, adapt to local circumstances, foster coordination across units, and make better decisions.

   Aligning activities with corporate objectives. To set a clear direction, the senior managers decided on four companywide priorities: cut costs, expand services to existing customers to grow revenues, invest selectively to improve infrastructure, and build an aggressive corporate culture. The company had only $15 million available for capital spending — less than a tenth of the total funding requested by managers — but it desperately needed to upgrade the infrastructure and trains so that it could expand services. Accordingly, the management team identified capital budgeting as a critical bottleneck keeping the company from achieving its objectives.

   Next, ALL’s CEO assembled a cross-functional team to develop simple rules for prioritizing capital spending. Any proposal, the rules said, should:

   •remove obstacles to growing revenues,

   •minimize up-front expenditure,

   •provide benefits immediately (rather than paying off in the long term), and

   •reuse existing resources.

   The simple rules aligned key decisions with corporate objectives. In addition, they translated the broad priorities “expand services to existing customers” and “cut costs” into clear guidelines that managers and employees understood and could act upon. The rules helped people avoid the paralysis that often strikes when they’re confronted with too many alternatives.

   Adapting to local circumstances. Once they understood the rules and their underlying rationale, ALL’s employees generated a series of innovative proposals based on what they had to work with. While its competitors were spending lavishly on new equipment, ALL repaired decommissioned engines from its “dead fleet,” bought used locomotives from African carriers, and replaced damaged sections of the main line with dismantled tracks from abandoned parking stations. One frontline employee came up with the idea of increasing the size of fuel tanks to lengthen the distance engines could go without refueling, which sharply reduced downtime during the peak harvest season.

   That inventive, from-the-ground-up approach contrasted sharply with the way investment decisions had been made in the past. The Brazilian railway authority had issued detailed investment guidelines that left local employees with little scope to exercise their creativity or judgment. That system was efficient, but the new management team decided that, at this moment in its history, the company needed adaptability more than efficiency.

   Fostering coordination. Strategies often falter in execution because of insufficient coordination across the organization. Employees frequently attribute breakdowns to incompetence or bad faith on the part of colleagues in other departments: “Those bozos in headquarters [or finance or marketing] screw everything up.” ALL was no exception: Each functional silo had its own agenda, criteria for evaluating proposals, and long history of distrusting other departments.

   The cross-functional team that created ALL’s rules included the head of each department as well as the CEO. As a result, the rules functioned as an explicit agreement across units to guide decision making — like a treaty. Negotiated decision criteria didn’t eliminate difficult trade-offs: ALL’s engineers still favored elegant solutions over quick fixes, and the sales team wanted anything that made customers happy. Like a treaty, the simple rules provided an agreed-upon framework for evaluating specific proposals.

   ALL’s simple rules also compelled managers to approach difficult decisions that affected different departments rationally, thereby limiting the role of emotion and politics. To avoid any misunderstandings, the team members worked hard to increase the transparency of the rules they had agreed to, talking through their decisions with departmental colleagues who were not directly involved in capital budgeting. Transparency did not mean that everyone was happy with every decision, but it did reduce the odds that an undesired outcome would be attributed to incompetence or politics.

   Making better decisions. Many people believe that complex problems require complex decision-making models. To prioritize projects, for instance, the ALL team could have forecast future cash flows for every potential investment and ranked all proposals on the basis of their net present value. But like most complicated models, that approach would have had many disadvantages relative to simple rules. Adding more variables leads decision makers to give too much weight to peripheral considerations. In addition, the opacity of black box models prevents users from testing them against their experience, judgment, or common sense. And of course, complex models demand huge volumes of data, are susceptible to computational errors, and hinge on assumptions about unknowable variables such as disruptive technologies that, if wrong, can throw off the results.

   Within three years, ALL’s Brazilian rail operations had increased revenues by 50% and tripled EBITDA. When the company went public, in 2004, it had grown to be Latin America’s largest independent logistics company, had the most extensive rail network in Latin America, was noted for its performance-oriented culture, and was listed among the best employers in Brazil.

   Simple rules represent the beating heart of strategy. When applied to a critical bottleneck, carefully crafted, and used in a mindful manner, they can guide the activities that matter. In a world of hard trade-offs, they are one of the few ways managers can increase alignment, adaptation, and coordination all at once.

   Posted by Philworldwide | 10/01/2013, 11:55 am
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5. 

   LINKING MISSION TO STRATEGY AND ACTION

   http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121119193311-16553-linking-mission-to-strategy-and-action?trk=NUS_UNIU_PEOPLE_FOLLOW-megaphone-fllw

   At a recent team retreat, Jen Pahlka identified a problem that crops up at Code for America (a non-profit she started that I am an adviser to), and that I immediately recognized from O’Reilly Media as well. We’re mission-driven organizations, and it’s easy to think that anything that supports our mission is worth doing. But in fact, there can be many things that are consistent with our mission that don’t advance our strategy or our programs.
   Jen provided a way of thinking about organizational priorities that is extremely useful. She drew a pyramid with four layers: Mission at the top, then Strategy, then Programs, then Activities as the broad base.
   So, for example, Code for America’s mission is to help government work better for everyone. Its strategy for doing that is to bring best practices from the technology industry into city governments as a way of making them more agile, more transparent, and more engaged with citizens. Its programs – the concrete embodiments of that strategy – include the Fellowship, a volunteer Brigade, the Peer Network, and the Civic Startup Accelerator. Cities were chosen as the focus because they are the most tractable level of government, with the most immediate impact on citizens, and because demographic trends are making them the most important level of government in the 21st century.
   The Fellowship recruits talented technologists for a year of service working with cities that present interesting problems that will make government work better, but more than that, have the potential for re-use by other cities. The Brigade recruits technologists and activists who can’t give a year of service, but can do occasional volunteer coding, documentation, open government activism, or other work to spread the applications developed by the Fellowship or other civic innovators to cities that are not yet part of the program. The Peer Network is a way for innovators in city government (including past and future participants in the Fellowship program) to share ideas and best practices, to work together on standards, and to share applications that are developed by the Fellowship or by other government innovation efforts. The Civic Startup Accelerator works to support an entrepreneurial ecosystem (including, potentially, startups developed by Fellows who want to continue to build and support applications created during their Fellowship year), so as to create a richer environment in which civic technology innovation can flourish.

   You can see how these programs complement and support each other. And you can also see how each of them in turn rests on a set of activities. Each year, Code for America needs to recruit new Fellows (in 2012, 550 applications for 26 Fellowship spots), new cities (in 2012, 30 applications for eight city partner spots). The organization, like all non-profits, needs to raise funds to operate. (Though participating cities pay for the direct costs of their Fellows, the rest of the organization’s operating funds come through grants and donations.) Brigade members need to be recruited and deployed on useful projects. Accelerator companies also need to be recruited and supported. And the Peer Network needs to be nurtured through a set of activities supporting professional networking, including regular working groups and an annual Code for America Summit.

   Now, here was Jen’s key point: “We’re a small organization. We can’t do everything. And we’re constantly being asked to support open government activities that don’t fit with our programs. While helping to launch a Code for Europe or Code for Africa, or working with the Federal or State government, would be consistent with our mission, it is defocusing because it doesn’t support our strategy, which is to start with cities. And it doesn’t help build any of our programs.”
   Even activities that might seem consistent with our mission and our strategy may not be appropriate unless they are tied to specific program outcomes. And what is appropriate changes over time. For example, sending a staff member to run a hackathon in a particular city might have been a great way to recruit cities or Fellows early in the organization’s history, when it had limited visibility. But now, the organization has a fair amount of national visibility, and the key role of staff is to recruit local Brigade members to run events like that.

   Finally, in a growing organization, the pyramid is also growing, both in terms of the scale of programs and activities, and sometimes by the development of new programs. For example, Code for America began with one program: the Fellowship. The Brigade grew out of the dual recognition that there were hundreds of Fellowship applicants who had to be turned away but who still wanted to contribute, and that there were hundreds of cities that wouldn’t be reached by the Fellowship for years, but that could still benefit from its work. The Peer Network likewise grew out of the recognition that we needed a way for cities to continue to work together once they had worked with the Fellowship. And the Accelerator grew out of the conviction that one of the best ways to make sustainable change in how cities use technology to improve government for all citizens is to grow the commercial ecosystem of companies providing civic services in new ways. Jen made the strategic decision not to scale the Fellowship program to include more cities and Fellows, but instead to find ways to scale and spread the impact that each of the city/Fellowship partnerships was making.

   Applying This Thinking to O’Reilly
   At O’Reilly, our mission is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
   Our core strategy is to find interesting people outside the company who are at some kind of cutting edge of innovation, and to amplify their effectiveness. We initially did this by capturing their knowledge and best practices in books, so that others could learn from them. We later realized that we could powerfully advance our mission by creating events that bring innovators together at conferences and other types of meetings, including “unconferences,” small-scale working groups, and massive public events like Maker Faire, where they can share their enthusiasm. We also realized that we could help them build startups – hence our early stage venture capital business, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. O’Reilly is a much bigger and more complex organization than Code for America, so I won’t recount all of our programs, but you should be able to see the pattern.

   Because people are at the center of our mission, we’ve recently reorganized from a product-centered organization (Books, Conferences, Online Learning, Video, Research, Investing), into what we’re calling “Practice Areas” focusing on particular cutting edge communities and the technologies that bring them together – for example, Strata for data science, Velocity for web performance, and Tools of Change for Publishing.

   Our second core strategy is to identify “big ideas” that frame the work of the innovators we discover, to show how they are part of a broader movement. We don’t market our products: we make heroes of the people at the cutting edge of innovation, and tell stories about what makes them important. The transformation of media by the World Wide Web, the Open Source Software movement, Web 2.0, Open Government (“Gov 2.0”), and the Maker movement are all examples of broad technology trends that we’ve named and nurtured. (I wrote about this in my earlier post, It’s Not About You.)

   And of course, each of our programs has activities that support it. We need to range broadly at the frontiers of innovation to discover people who are shaping the future. We need to recruit them as authors, conference speakers, and startup founders. We need to build channels for distributing our products. We need to find attendees and sponsors for our events. We need to transform our book publishing program to the ebook era. And so on. And so on.

   But it’s easy to do things that support our mission without driving the activities that support our programs to implement our strategy. For example, when we run an event like Foo Camp, an unconference designed to help us suss out interesting futures and people at interesting edges, it’s easy to over-weight our friends (forgetting the research and outreach nature of the event), or to fail to invite people who would advance specific strategic initiatives at the company.
   And it’s easy to fall into silos, so that we support only one part of the pyramid rather than the whole thing. We’ve had many a missed opportunity because we didn’t realize that one of our authors would be a terrific conference presenter, or that one of our conference presenters was cooking up a startup that we would have wanted to invest in.

   What I love about Jen’s notion of the strategic pyramid is that it reminds us that mission and strategy aren’t enough. Yes, as they say, execution is everything. What the strategic pyramid helps you to do is to identify the foundations that support your mission, and to make sure that the whole thing adds up. So many of us build organizations that look like Rube Goldberg devices, with unsupported activities that fit with the mission but have no chance of success because they are under-resourced, activities left over from past strategies, and programs that don’t actually support where we’re trying to go.
   What’s also wonderful about the pyramid is that it reminds us that the base is always broader than the top. All of the activities of the organization need to hang together. So many times, a company’s new strategic initiatives get lots of attention, but the execution depends on the work of many people who run supporting activities at the company. A true understanding of the strategic pyramid requires constantly valuing and investing in the base of the pyramid as well as in new programs and strategic initiatives.

   Posted by philworldwide | 07/02/2013, 12:30 pm
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6. 

   PLAYING TO WIN – STRATEGY IS CHOICES TO WIN

   http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000146696&play=1

   According to A.G. Lafley (Author), Strategy is 5 choices, i.e.:

   1) What is winning?
   2) Where to play?
   3) How to win?
   4) What are the core competencies to win?
   5) What systems and measures will drive winning?

   For P&G Strategy is to decide; What business to be in & What business not to be in.
   At P&G they are articulating strategic choices chronologically, e.g.:
   i) Straightforward strategy is to grow from the core (articulate what is core).
   ii) Extend into priority emerging markets.
   iii) Continually improve productivity (to generate cash that enable long-term growth)

   Part of Strategy is then to identify a group of consumers that have a need that is not met. Then provide a product (brand) that delivers a performance, a value, an experience that leads to prefer regular usage.

   For example P&G acquired the Gillette brand which is considered to be a great strategic move because of the following:

   a) The asset (Gillette) significantly strengthened the P&G strategic position.
   b) This created new categories in the P&G business and financial benefits from the synergies.
   c) The brand positioned P&G in categories that became core and strengthened the P&G strengths, e.g. male grooming & female grooming.

   A.G. Lafley further mentioned that part of Strategy is to assess the Circle of Concern versus Circle of Influence versus Circle of Control.

   He concluded that “Capitalism is creative destruction”……

   Posted by philworldwide | 25/02/2013, 11:47 pm
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