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The Strategist’s Dilemma: What Makes a Breakthrough Strategy

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The Quest for Breakthrough Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide

It is not about numbers and data, nor just about products and technology. Breakthrough strategies are a never-ending quest for differentiation. An investigation into what is involved in making it.

The Apple Approach: Innovation Beyond Products

Apple designs beautiful products that dazzle technocrats at every turn. Yet the products are just the tip of the carefully curated innovation spear. In fact, the company saves significant amounts of money on supply chain management, giving it an edge over others. CEO Tim Cook has received several praises for bringing efficiencies to Apple’s supply chain.

The Evolution of Product Innovation

Product innovations are essential for business success. A nice little feature that allows you to safely boot a device with a fingerprint or a special graphics chip into a computer. Users appreciate this progress. But new functions and features alone are not enough for continued differentiation.

Nurturing Breakthroughs Beyond Design

Nowadays designs can be executed in record time. Start a new gizmo and its technical configuration will soon appear online. They are the easiest for competitors to copy. Interestingly, an anti-award – the Plagiarius Award – is given to the makers and sellers found guilty of the most outrageous product imitations.

Exploring Breakthrough Strategies

So it’s just as important for companies to nurture other sources of breakthroughs – processes, revenue models, customer engagement, and so on – to achieve greater and more sustainable competitive advantage. We look at what breakthrough strategies really are, and how to develop a good one.

Who-What-How Continuum: Escaping Mindscapes

A group of MBA students were given an exercise: splitting into pairs and arm wrestling. The winner is the one who pushes the opponent’s hand down the maximum number of times in 60 seconds. The pass rate for most was two or three. But the winner was a pair whose number was in the hundreds. The duo simply decided to work together by not resisting, rather than competing.

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Defining Your Strategic Position

A strategic position is the most feasible sum of who/what/how of your company.

WHO Should you target yourself as a customer?

What products or services should you offer (value proposition)?

How is it best to supply (distribute or produce) these to your customers?

The lack of a clear choice in this area is a common source of strategic disappointment for many companies.

Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation

After examining more than 2,000 innovations throughout history, Doblin found that most breakthroughs fall under ten innovation frameworks that fall under three categories: configuration, offering, and experience. The former is the most internally focused, related to the operations of a business and away from customers, and the latter is the most obvious to the customers. Offering is a combination of both.

Doblin’s framework can be a great catalyst for strategists and managers to think about transformation and escape limiting mindscapes. Each individual type or a combination thereof can be used to lead business innovation.

Five Principles to Build Innovation Instincts

The Role of Dissenters, Outsiders, and Cassandras

Dissenters within organizations are often rejected. Outsiders are considered threats. And the bad news bearers, also known as the Cassandras, are never heard. When in fact they are the richest source and raw material for breakthroughs.

Importance of Craft Time: The 15% Principle

3M, an American multinational conglomerate, has a 15% rule that invites company employees to spend 15% of their time per day on “experimental drawing” or simply on their favorite projects. By providing a little leeway or freedom, such a rule provides a breath of fresh air in the otherwise mundane, rigid routine.

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Being Both Better and Different

Most strategists are faced with the classic dilemma: should I invest in developing new products or improving existing ones? To be successful, you have to do both.

Asking the Right Questions

It may sound strange, but formulating questions correctly is more important than finding solutions. Asking intelligent questions that illuminate different angles of a problem is an art. Every strategist can use good questions as a trigger for a good strategy.

A Commitment to Continuous Search for a Strategic Position

Because no strategic position remains unique forever, it is important to work continuously on improvements as a principle. Those who become too comfortable with current success soon find their once impregnable position being taken by someone else.

Successful breakthroughs don’t come from trying to beat the dominant player at their own game, but from changing the rules of the game. It requires creating strategic positions, out of sight of anyone else. Certified Strategy Professionals are equipped with a broader understanding of the business world and a new strategic mindset to help multinationals win and recover.

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