What's Changing? - Strategy

 

Please see below selected recent strategy-related change.

 

See also:

• What's New? - Strategy

 

October 2020

• Executives on the C-suite are being forced to adjust strategies more often, and the global pandemic has amplified this need. Businesses want to self-disrupt before competitors disrupt them, and the executive group in charge of implementing strategy is expanding with new roles, such as Chief Growth Officer, Chief Transformation Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer. At the same time, strategy now needs to focus on all stakeholders - not just shareholders. Competitors also need to be considered as potential partners in order to thrive in an uncertain future. All of these forces are changing the way companies formulate and execute strategy, noted EY.

 

August 2020

• Along with the accelerated pace of change caused by the coronavirus pandemic comes a unique opportunity to unlock big strategic moves, claimed McKinsey, whose research found that companies that pursued big strategic moves persistently, through every phase of the economic cycle, increased their odds of outperforming their peers. Much of the organisational inertia that usually stands in the way of unlocking these big moves is now gone, as the crisis has rendered obsolete the budgets and personal targets that make such moves so hard to achieve.

 

December 2018

• Operational changes during a crisis often have lasting impact on strategy implementation. Quartz connected with leaders that have experienced crisis to identify ways executives can use a crisis as an opportunity to improve strategy design and implementation capabilities - read more.

 

2016

Key developments:

• Why Popular Strategies Always Fade - strategy+business
• 10 Principles of Strategic Leadership - strategy+business social media content
• strategy+business magazine Summer 2016 quick guide
• From the outside in - straetgy+business
• Strategy That Works, Strategy&’s new book published through the Harvard Business Review.

 

May 2016

 

 

• Only 13% of companies successfully execute their strategies, claimed a recent book. Lack of commitment to a shared mission and lack of “connectedness” – open communication among executives and employees – are significant factors when companies fall short. Disconnected employees don’t engage with each other, with their executives or with their companies’ strategies, plans and goals. Connectedness dominates in firms that win Best Place to Work competitions. Their executives promote regular, positive conversations as a foundation of their organisational culture. Such exchanges can help your firm become a “Thirteener” company – one of the 13% of organisations that actually implements its strategies.

 

 

 

• More than ever, companies need to devote time to strategy, argued the Boston Consulting Group. Nearly one-tenth of public companies disappear each year—a fourfold increase in mortality since 1965. And the life span of the average company has halved since 1970. Faced with those odds, it doesn’t make sense to put all your chips on agility. Agility is great, but it’s more powerful when paired with preparedness. And achieving strategic preparedness takes a structured, organised thought process to identify and consider potential threats, disruptions, and opportunities - which is, for want of a better term, strategic planning.

 

 

 

April 2016

 

 

• The world of strategy is thick with ideas and frameworks, noted The Boston Consulting Group, while claiming that its new book, 'Your Strategy Needs a Strategy' will help readers cut through the noise and find clarity regarding which approach, or combination of approaches, is their best bet. The book includes a "strategy palette" which proposes five distinct approaches to strategy, helping leaders to match their approach to their business environment and execute effectively and to combine different approaches.

 

 

• See also Strategy That Works video: Five Acts to Transform Your Future.

 

 

 

March 2016

 

 

• strategy+business, in 'Has Your Strategy’s Shelf Life Expired?' argued that successful strategies ensure that companies will eventually outgrow their target customers. Competition, innovation, and demographics ensure the opposite: that target customers will outgrow their strategies. Both scenarios create existential threats. The only way out is to stretch your strategies in ways that will open new markets to conquer when you’ve hit the limits of your original markets, or to breathe new life into your current markets when they are starting to slip from your grasp.

 

 

 

February 2016

 

 

• One in three US board members and executives are “very concerned” that the climate of uncertainty and volatility may pose a significant threat to their corporate strategy, and more than three in four worry that management tends to use outdated assumptions in setting strategy, according to a survey by the Board Leadership Centre of KPMG.

 

 

• With research showing that not even half of all strategic plans successfully reach their goals, and a world changing at a higher speed than ever before, it may actually seem futile and naïve to invest time into strategy development. Meantime, there are counter-detractors who insist strategy is still essential, but companies are doing it wrongly - either by overlooking execution or using outmoded planning methods, or both. But this debate often neglects what is, in INSEAD's opinion, the best argument for strategy’s continued relevance: strategic approaches to business - and life - just make deep-down sense to human beings.

 

 

• Strategy&'s CEO told the Wall Street Journal that the single greatest reason companies get into trouble is because CEOs are bad at strategy. Consider these two rather shocking statistics: 81% of the time when major shareholder value is destroyed it’s because of bad strategy decisions. And only 8% of all executives are good at both strategy and execution - that is, betting on the right strategy and doing the right things to make it happen.

 

 

• Almost every business today faces major strategic challenges. The path to creating value is seldom clear. In an ongoing global survey of senior executives conducted by Strategy&, more than half of the 4,400 respondents said they didn’t think they had a winning strategy. In another survey of more than 500 senior executives around the world, nine out of 10 conceded that they were missing major opportunities in the market. In the same survey, about 80 percent of those senior executives said that their overall strategy was not well understood, even within their own company. These problems are not caused simply by external forces. They are the outcome of the way most companies are managed. In all too many businesses there is a significant and unnecessary gap between strategy and execution: a lack of connection between where the enterprise aims to go and what it can accomplish.

 

 

• See also: The 5 elements of #StrategyThatWorks fly in the face of what most business schools teach students. via @MarketWatch http://strat.to/YnPS9; Rejecting industry best practices can mean gaining in differentiation. That’s #StrategyThatWorks: http://strat.to/YnPS9 ; The hypothesis of #StrategyThatWorks: reliably successful companies let capabilities drive strategy. http://strat.to/YnPS9

 

 

• 'Strategy that Works' is a new book from Harvard Business Review Press by Paul Leinwand, Principal at PwC's Strategy& and Cesare Mainardi, retired CEO of Strategy&, which demystifies the perennial question of “why are certain companies so successful?” Strategy That Works guides corporate leaders through real-life examples of how successful companies around the world have bridged the gap between strategy and execution to rise to the top of their industries. An excellent summary of the book and its key concepts can be found in the recent strategy+business article. or more information and resources, visit the Strategy that Works Spark group. See also Strategy& perspectives.

 

 

 

January 2016

 

 

• In 'Why Your Company Needs a Resident Futurist', INSEAD argued that being far-sighted about your strategy can help you prepare for the big global changes already unfolding. As a first step, companies should at least be starting conversations around this question and searching for the megatrends most applicable to them.

 

 

 

November 2015

 

 

• Accounting firms face many changes, from industry consolidation and disruptive technologies, to a changing field of competition, new revenue models, fee negotiations, and continued innovation. To meet these challenges, accounting firms need to build a strong strategic leadership bench. Accounting Today made recommendations on how to this, reflecting two decades of experience developing strategic leaders at leading companies around the world, as well as research conducted at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

 

 

 

September 2015

 

 

• In "The Reclamation of Strategy", strategy+business warned that using big data to improve a business means more than just collecting the information, or even analysing it - companies must develop a strategy for how to use the information to build their brands. Unfortunately, many firms are using big data tactically, rather than strategically. Marketers, in particular, are not realiisng the full potential of big data - they’re mainly using it to drive programmatic advertising.

 

 

 

June 2015

 

 

• Beaton Capital recently published a piece on the evolution of strategy consulting from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the digital disruption of today...describing inter alia Clayton Christensen’s job-to-be-done framework proposes a way to re-engineer the competitive landscape. Firms that organise around job-to-be-done framework and build centres of excellence around this will make it more difficult for competitors to imitate.

 

 

• strategy+business reported on how companies can tap into more dynamic tools to develop better strategies for how and where they’re competing.

 

 

 

May 2015

 

 

• Source published its best new research and ideas from consulting firms for strategy and marketing leaders. (Please consult Dominic Kelleher for details.)

 

 

• Strategy&'s Annual Study of CEOs, Governance, and Success quantified the cost of change at the top. It found that forced CEO turnovers caused an estimated $1.8 billion in lost shareholder value per company. It's a stark reminder that your biggest threats often come from within. Most people assume that natural disasters or other outside forces are the chief culprits that destroy companies. But most of the time, that's simply not the case. In fact, 80% of corporate value destruction comes from bad strategy decisions. That means getting strategy right is the single most valuable decision that any executive can make.

 

 

 

January 2015

 

 

• AT Kearney asked executives about strategy formulation failures. Most complained that it is an insufficiently inspired, unrealistic, impractical, and detached process due to: lack of understanding of future trends (88%), little understanding of internal capabilities (87%), too much top-down approach (84%), not enough logical thinking (84%). Shaping Tomorrow therefore examined what is changing in the strategy space and found that: conventional approaches to business planning and strategy will leave many businesses stranded at a competitive disadvantage; anticipating the future and shaping it ahead of rivals is the next competitive advantage; business areas with low levels of investment and expertise could be left ill-prepared for anticipated demand in the period of recovery; scenario planning will be not unusual but a social technology that will be part of the "collective intelligence" of the future, and scenarios will be used more alongside other strategy work as uncertainty increases.

 

 

• Exploring new options versus exploiting existing ones is the trade-off at the heart of business strategy, according to the Boston Consulting Group. With increasing change and unpredictability across industry sectors, finding an optimal balance to this trade-off is more important than ever. A new BCG atlas servces as a guide to the various strategy traps that can be encountered when balancing between exploration and exploitation, highlighting both "sirens" (warning signs) and "lighthouses" (best practices). BCG illustrates these traps with examples from business and beyond, drawing upon advances in algorithmic theory as well as more colourful lessons provided by famous explorers and inventors.

 

 

• An MBA who has worked as a strategy consultant and as an entrepreneur and who has set up several organisations - including World 50, which brings together the top senior executives in various fields to network - believes strategy is dead. He points to the Merriam-Webster definition of strategy: “A careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.” In the past, a long period of time might be 10 years. These days, he asks, is it even nine months? Well-thought-out plans are revisited every quarter or six months, given how tumultuous the business world is. Being too methodical can leave you wide open to be overtaken by somebody who is agile.

November 2015

 

 

• Accounting firms face many changes, from industry consolidation and disruptive technologies, to a changing field of competition, new revenue models, fee negotiations, and continued innovation. To meet these challenges, accounting firms need to build a strong strategic leadership bench. Accounting Today made recommendations on how to this, reflecting two decades of experience developing strategic leaders at leading companies around the world, as well as research conducted at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

 

 

 

September 2015

 

 

• In "The Reclamation of Strategy", strategy+business warned that using big data to improve a business means more than just collecting the information, or even analysing it - companies must develop a strategy for how to use the information to build their brands. Unfortunately, many firms are using big data tactically, rather than strategically. Marketers, in particular, are not realiisng the full potential of big data - they’re mainly using it to drive programmatic advertising.

 

 

 

 

 

June 2015

 

 

• Beaton Capital recently published a piece on the evolution of strategy consulting from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the digital disruption of today...describing inter alia Clayton Christensen’s job-to-be-done framework proposes a way to re-engineer the competitive landscape. Firms that organise around job-to-be-done framework and build centres of excellence around this will make it more difficult for competitors to imitate.

 

 

• strategy+business reported on how companies can tap into more dynamic tools to develop better strategies for how and where they’re competing.

 

 

 

May 2015

 

 

• Source published its best new research and ideas from consulting firms for strategy and marketing leaders. (Please consult Dominic Kelleher for details.)

 

 

• Strategy&'s Annual Study of CEOs, Governance, and Success quantified the cost of change at the top. It found that forced CEO turnovers caused an estimated $1.8 billion in lost shareholder value per company. It's a stark reminder that your biggest threats often come from within. Most people assume that natural disasters or other outside forces are the chief culprits that destroy companies. But most of the time, that's simply not the case. In fact, 80% of corporate value destruction comes from bad strategy decisions. That means getting strategy right is the single most valuable decision that any executive can make.

 

 

 

January 2015

 

 

• AT Kearney asked executives about strategy formulation failures. Most complained that it is an insufficiently inspired, unrealistic, impractical, and detached process due to: lack of understanding of future trends (88%), little understanding of internal capabilities (87%), too much top-down approach (84%), not enough logical thinking (84%). Shaping Tomorrow therefore examined what is changing in the strategy space and found that: conventional approaches to business planning and strategy will leave many businesses stranded at a competitive disadvantage; anticipating the future and shaping it ahead of rivals is the next competitive advantage; business areas with low levels of investment and expertise could be left ill-prepared for anticipated demand in the period of recovery; scenario planning will be not unusual but a social technology that will be part of the "collective intelligence" of the future, and scenarios will be used more alongside other strategy work as uncertainty increases.

 

 

• Exploring new options versus exploiting existing ones is the trade-off at the heart of business strategy, according to the Boston Consulting Group. With increasing change and unpredictability across industry sectors, finding an optimal balance to this trade-off is more important than ever. A new BCG atlas servces as a guide to the various strategy traps that can be encountered when balancing between exploration and exploitation, highlighting both "sirens" (warning signs) and "lighthouses" (best practices). BCG illustrates these traps with examples from business and beyond, drawing upon advances in algorithmic theory as well as more colourful lessons provided by famous explorers and inventors.

 

 

• An MBA who has worked as a strategy consultant and as an entrepreneur and who has set up several organisations - including World 50, which brings together the top senior executives in various fields to network - believes strategy is dead. He points to the Merriam-Webster definition of strategy: “A careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.” In the past, a long period of time might be 10 years. These days, he asks, is it even nine months? Well-thought-out plans are revisited every quarter or six months, given how tumultuous the business world is. Being too methodical can leave you wide open to be overtaken by somebody who is agile.

 

• The Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute took a fresh look at some of BCG’s classic thinking on strategy to explore its relevance to today’s business environment.Its latest article examined the growth share matrix, a portfolio management tool developed by BCG founder Bruce Henderson.

 

• The Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute took a fresh look at some of BCG’s classic thinking on strategy to explore its relevance to today’s business environment. Its latest article examined the growth share matrix, a portfolio management tool developed by BCG founder Bruce Henderson.