Company Strategy Yieldings: The Canonical Guide

Managers often express discontent, either explicitly or implicitly, with existing strategic planning — the core activity of strategy. To them, strategic planning should be more about collective wisdom building than top-down or bottom-up planning. They think that it should be more conversational than solely documentation-driven, and it should be more about building the big picture than about number-crunching exercises.
Resilience is deeply relevant to nearly every core business activity: product development, sourcing and procurement, human capital development, natural resource acquisition and use, financial capital deployment, and marketing and communications. Resilient business strategies are the best pathway for companies to compete and deliver value and for business and society to thrive.
Most of today’s fastest-growing companies — from Amazon and Google, to Alibaba and Tencent — are explicitly positioning themselves as ecosystem players, as hubs within networks of customers, suppliers, and producers of complementary services. Industry observers and regulators are looking on with interest and concern. They want to understand if these companies have developed a new way of competing that might challenge the conventional view of how businesses create and capture value.
There is no universal or one-size-fits-all prescription for a winning business. But corporate leaders today seem to agree that strategic alignment is high on the list. Strategic alignment means that all elements of a business—including the market strategy and the way the company itself is organized — are arranged in such a way as to best support the fulfillment of its longterm purpose.

Key Players In Setting Strategy

Learn as much as you can so you’re informed, not just reacting to rumor and innuendo. Use your internal network and ask others in the organization for insight, context, and clarity. When you’ve done the hard work of sense-making, you’ll be able to anticipate the questions your team will ask and prepare the most effective answers you can.
The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer, strength applied to the most promising opportunity. The standard modern treatment of strategy has expanded this idea into a rich discussion of potential strengths, today called “advantages.”
Strategic creativity can be unlocked systematically. The field of strategy was predominantly focused on how to compete in established markets, creating an arsenal of analytic tools and frameworks to skillfully achieve this.
An acquisition strategy relies on business purchases and mergers to grow an organisation. Benefits can include gaining valuable skills and staff – in addition to new funding pools and assets – as well as increasing market share, reducing competition, and diversification of products and services.

Strategy Involves Choice

Leaders need to be both proactive and reactive, managing planned and emerging issues with equal success. This juggling act is difficult. Too often, businesses are either wedded to strategies and plans, focusing on a long view that may be undermined by events, or they are fire-fighting, reacting to circumstances, with little or no prospect of achieving steady and sustainable growth.
There is a saying in business that “before you do anything, you have to do something else first.” In strategic planning, what you have to do first is think about and agree on the foundation principles of your business.
The main focus of a business strategy is to fulfil the business objective. It gives the vision and direction to the business with clear instructions of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and who all are responsible for it.
Subdivide strategic plans into a business plan for each operating unit, and then into objectives for each department, team and ultimately each individual. Always start by asking some basic questions such as: What business are we in? What is our purpose? Where are we now? Where do we want to be in the future? How will we achieve this?

Strategy Formulation

Setting a strategy that will help your organization or business unit succeed while responding to new competitors and changes to your industry is daunting. Assessing potential threats while creating new ways to grow is a difficult balance. Choose the wrong strategy, and you can stumble—or worse, go out of business. But find the right strategy and you can stand out to your customers and last for years to come.
Product factors inevitably have a significant impact on competitiveness. They include pricing and discounts, distribution channels, marketing methods, brand reputation and appeal, product quality and how the product relates to others (for example, the popularity of film merchandise rests largely on the success of the film).
Most of the times, you get to know about your real strengths and weaknesses while formulating a strategy. Moreover, it also helps you capitalise on what you’re good at and use that to overshadow your weaknesses (or eliminate them).
Leaders of small businesses tend to make assumptions about what they believe is true about the market, their businesses, their products, their competitors, and their people. They are sure they know why their customers buy from them, and how their products best meet customer needs. If they can’t see past their often false assumptions, they won’t be prepared for the battles that are ahead. They’ll be vulnerable to competitors who take seriously the charge to truly understand their organizations, marketplace, and customers.

Defeat The Competition

Fast following is not strategy but the abdication of strategy. The companies least likely to be successful at it are those that make it their goal. They don’t know what to follow fast and when to start following. Don’t fast follow. Choose where to play and how to win; then watch what happens, learn, and adjust your choices accordingly.
There are those who prefer to begin their approach to strategy with action. My own insights, however, normally don’t start with action. I tend to use a problem-first structure. I am better at starting with a frame or diagnosis of the situation and then working through the guiding policy and action elements.
Business and corporate strategy deal with large-scale design-type problems. The greater the challenge, or the higher the performance sought, the more interactions have to be considered. A good strategy coordinates policies across activities to focus the competitive punch.
Resilient business strategies call for a fresh look at many, if not all, elements of business. While a comprehensive treatment of all such steps is beyond the scope of this paper, we provide a set of steps and actions that companies can take to shift their efforts to achieve better outcomes: stronger businesses and stronger societies, evolving business models, and products and services that deliver value for all stakeholders.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Frequently recurring problems may be several different problems, all linked and with many causes. In such circumstances, Pareto analysis can be useful in organising the data so that the most significant factors are clearly illustrated. This is based upon the 80–20 Pareto principle: that 80% of problems are caused by 20% of possible factors. To tackle a problem, therefore, concentrate on the troublemaking 20%.
ne of the most fundamental decisions for any organisation is to choose the most effective strategy for growth. It is tempting to believe that doing in the future what has been done in the past will lead to continued growth – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – but the past is no guarantee for the future.
Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
Too often strategists conflate predictability and malleability — thinking that any environment that can be shaped is unpredictable — and thus divide the world of strategic possibilities into only two parts (predictable and immutable or unpredictable and mutable), whereas they ought to consider all four.

Blueprinting The Capabilities System

What consistently separates winners from losers is their approach to strategy. Companies caught in the saturated industries follow a conventional approach, racing to beat the competition by building a defensible position within the existing industry order.
Economic profits are the difference between the total revenue and the total opportunity cost of producing the firm’s goods or services. The opportunity cost of using a resource includes both the explicit (or accounting) cost of the resource and the implicit cost of giving up the best alternative use of the resource. The opportunity cost of producing a good or service generally is higher than accounting costs because it includes both the dollar value of costs (explicit, or accounting, costs) and any implicit costs.
Great CEOs are great leaders. They know themselves and what they stand for. They have been called on all their lives as problem solvers because others know them to be fair and impartial. People respect their opinions and look to them for guidance.
Treat the stable nature of your capabilities as a strength, not a weakness. The goal of being adaptive and resilient is admirable, and when you’re in industries under disruption, you have to move quickly. But you can’t move effectively unless you’re willing to plot your expansion path in line with, not in opposition to, your existing strengths.

Have A Divestment Strategy

Choosing your product or service means choosing your competitor as well. Often, you can change your business by deciding to compete against another organization. Changing your competitor can lead to changing your business completely.
A structuralist business strategy is one that is built around current market and industry norms. Everything from products to processes is structured around current market conditions and industry standards, and the business strategy is developed around this structure.
One of the most significant barriers to growth is poor targeting. Absent of very specific targets, companies suffer from unclear messaging and thus misalignment between sales and marketing. Defining niches and specialties allows companies to focus resources (of course, some companies are generalists by design).
In a fast-moving, reactive environment, when predictions are likely to be wrong and longterm plans are essentially useless, the goal cannot be to optimize efficiency; rather, it must be to engineer flexibility. Accordingly, planning cycles may shrink to less than a year or even become continual.

Key Financial Indicators

The concept of positioning relates to how a product is perceived by customers relative to its competitors. It originated in the advertising industry as a way of identifying those attributes of a product that should be placed in the buyer’s consciousness. For example, a product may be positioned as inexpensive, innovative, old fashioned, prestigious, high quality or any of a multitude of other attributes. Positioning influences attitudes to and perceptions of a product or company brand, rather than changing the product itself. The value of positioning decisions is that they increase awareness of a company’s or product’s capabilities.
Leaders and companies that have effectively defined corporate purpose typically have done so with one of two approaches: retrospective or prospective. The retrospective approach builds on a firm’s existing reason for being. It requires that you look back, codify organizational and cultural DNA, and make sense of the firm’s past. The focus of the discovery process is internal. The prospective approach, on the other hand, reshapes your reason for being. It requires you to look forward, take stock of the broader ecosystem in which you want to work, and assess your potential for impact in it.
In an uncertain and fast-changing world, leaders must provide stability, certainty and a sound foundation. They must set out and communicate a consistent set of values and principles to make the process of change sustainable. In short, leaders must ground themselves in the certainty of a specific perspective, before leading people into a shifting, uncertain world of possibilities.
To build competitive advantage, an organisation must encourage challenges to accepted norms and engage in direct dialogue with customers and other stakeholders. It should not rely on assumptions that have little evidence to support them. Having a corporate culture that encourages or allows this is essential. In reversal theory terms, the rebellious motivational state, rather than the conforming state, needs to dominate.

Engage The Entire Company

In some industries, the basis of competition can remain unchanged for decades, and leaders who stick to their strategy through downturns as well as upturns and ignore surface noise do very well. It is precisely when long-held assumptions about an industry are challenged that strategic changes happen. And you will need to make those changes very quickly. Thinking about strategy as a long-term commitment can blind you to that need.
A lack of sufficiently thorough analysis is common in decision-making. The natural tendency is for people to gravitate towards a particular option, often because of prejudice, fear (especially fear of change), a desire to avoid risk, laziness, or an over-reliance on instinct.
Today, we live in a world where we have to specialize and do a few things exceptionally well. Your chosen area of specialization largely determines the future of your business. You can specialize in a product or service, a customer segment, or a market area. When you specialize in a product or service area, your specialization is easy to describe.
In most industries, competitors converge around a common definition of who the target buyer is. In reality, though, there is a chain of “buyers” who are directly or indirectly involved in the buying decision. The purchasers who pay for the product or service may differ from the actual users, and in some cases there are important influencers as well. Although these three groups may overlap, they often differ.

Comments

Ha sokáig tartok valamit, és utána kimondom, elképesztő, hogy a fény sokkal jobban ragyog.

論争はあなたのブログ投稿の一部です。私はすきです。

Važno je razotkriti mitove o ovoj temi, a vi to izvrsno radite.

如果我说有些日子我对你写的东西没有生气，那我就是在撒谎。但我真的很努力把过去的很多愤怒和失望。

更多，更多，更多这样的内容。

Bra information. Jag ska kolla in resten av din blogg.

귀하의 게시물은 전문가에게 매우 간단합니다. 앞으로 조금 연장해 주시겠습니까?

Helemaal geweldig onderwerp.

Lūdzu, vairāk par šo saturu!

这些科目是惊人的。

Lo scopo della tua scrittura è quello di rappresentare non l'aspetto esteriore delle cose, ma il loro significato interiore.

Vapim za redom i nalazim ga samo na tvom blogu.

Informationen är verkligen användbar och verkligen motiverande.

Mindenkinek elmondom ezt a tartalmat.

Lieta ir tāda, ka šis raksts ir rets un īslaicīgs. Triumfs!

Nach dem Lesen dieses Artikels werden Träume wahr.

Ne znam što bih bez tebe i nadam se da to nikada neću morati saznati!

Moja omiljena aktivnost vikendom po lošem vremenu bila je da ostanem kod kuće uz vatru uz neki đubretni misteriozni roman ili dva.

Man ļoti patika lasīt šo tēmu.

시간과 공간-혼자 있는 시간, 움직일 수 있는 공간-이것은 내일의 큰 희소성이 될 수 있습니다.

Nu trebuie să fii niciodată mulțumit de ceea ce scrii. Trebuie să te enervezi, teribil de supărat din cauza asta.

Sabaha ne kadar sakin bir akıllı giriş!

Tāds rakstnieks kā jūs ir kāds, kurš ražo lietas, kas cilvēkiem nav vajadzīgas.

Même si les gens font du mal, nous sommes des animaux sociaux, alors que pouvons-nous faire pour les empêcher de faire les mêmes choses à l'avenir ?

Thank you for helping me understand this.

Dankie vir die deel van sulke wonderlike inligting. Dit is regtig nuttig vir my. Ek soek altyd om kwaliteit inhoud te lees.

非常有趣和惊人的文章。感谢分享。

Recite svima o ovoj temi.

我的心和灵魂永远感激你。谢谢你真棒。

Chiar dacă trebuie să stau singur, nu îmi va fi frică să stau singur. Am de gând să lupt pentru tine. O să lupt pentru ceea ce este corect. O să lupt să trag oamenii la răspundere.

让我们改变对这个主题的传统态度。

บทความนี้หิน!

それはあなたがあなた自身のためにすることなので、書くことは非常にトリッキーです。

บล็อกนี้ไม่เคยมาก่อนเวลาของเขา แต่คนส่วนใหญ่ตามหลังพวกเขา

Celui qui est incapable d'éprouver de fortes passions, d'être secoué par la colère, de vivre dans tous les sens du terme, ne sera jamais un bon écrivain.

나는 많은 문제를 가지고 있지만, 나는 내가 무엇을 만들든 행복하기 위해 무엇을 해야 하는지를 직감하는 데 정말 능숙합니다. 나는 나 자신을 멈출 때를 알고, 시작할 때를 알고, 무언가를 혼자 남겨둘 때를 압니다. 나는 완전히 그것에 탐닉하는 것 같아서 시간을 할애한다.

Jeg ved ikke hvorfor jeg altid har været så betaget af dit forfatterskab.

Elolvastam néhány cikket a webhelyeden, és nagyon tetszik a stílusod.

Ten post jest bardzo przydatny.Dziękuję za te przydatne informacje.

Het ochtendblog-leesritueel. Geen dag is goed zonder.

Fortsett å dele god informasjon.

Ako čujete glas u sebi kako kaže 'ne možete pisati', onda svakako pišite i taj glas će biti utišan.

나는 단지 이 블로그를 읽는 것을 멈출 수 없었다.

Takk for dine tanker om dette emnet.

Ein Lichtblick im vergangenen Jahr war meine Entdeckung dieses Blogs. Es hat mir eine Möglichkeit gegeben, zu ungewöhnlichen Zeiten gesellig zu sein, ohne das Haus zu verlassen.

Nagyon érdekes és lenyűgöző cikk. Köszönet a megosztásért.

あなたがすべてを失うとき、あなたが一歩下がってあなたが持っているものを評価し始めなければ、あなたは落ち込んでしまいます。

Jeg prøvde en stund å bli forfatter, men kjedet meg håpløst. For meg var det meningsløst, men du ser ut til å nyte det. Lykke til med det.

Obsah byl mimo tento svět.

Aceste subiecte au fost senzaționale.

En cuanto a tener paz dentro de mí, la única forma en que puedo hacerlo es perdonando a las personas que me han hecho mal. Causa más estrés para acumular ira. La paz es más productiva.

Primjećujem novi pristup pisanju na vašem blogu i funkcionira.

史上最高のブログ投稿？

La sera il gatto si avvicina a me sulla mia sedia preferita e si rannicchia facendo le fusa. La combinazione di morbida pelliccia calda e ronzio rimbombante porta sempre pace.

Großartiger Artikel. Danke für das Teilen.

Moenie skaam of geïntimideer wees nie. Moet nooit voel dat jy nie wonderlik is nie.

Disse blogginnleggene var oppsiktsvekkende.

सबसे खूबसूरत चीज जो हम अनुभव कर सकते हैं वह है रहस्यमय। यह सभी सच्ची कला और विज्ञान का स्रोत है।

Если вы дадите людям ничто, они смогут подумать, чего можно добиться от этого ничто.

I always prefer to read quality content and this is what I found in your post.

Wow this blog was amazing.

Zaman ve uzay - yalnız kalma zamanı, hareket etme zamanı - bunlar yarının büyük kıtlıkları olabilir.

Dankie vir hierdie nuttige inligting.

Dit onderwerp wordt nooit beter, maar na het lezen hiervan is het materiaal van het onderwerp nooit helemaal hetzelfde.

L'elenco dei film che voglio vedere, nuovi e ripetuti dal passato, si allunga.

Aș minți dacă aș spune că nu sunt supărat în câteva zile pentru ceea ce ai scris. Dar chiar am muncit din greu pentru a pune o mare parte din mânie și dezamăgire în trecut.

É sobre individualidade, auto-expressão, singularidade; tudo isso está faltando nesta tentativa clonada e comercial de aproximação.

Μην ντρέπεστε και μην τρομάζετε. Ποτέ μην αισθάνεστε ότι δεν είστε καταπληκτικοί.

정말 좋은 기사와 도움이됩니다.

मुझे बस इससे नफरत है। और मुझे नफरत है कि मैं इस ब्लॉग पर अन्य लोगों की स्वीकृति के लिए एक स्टैंड ले रहा हूं।

Den bedste artikel nogensinde!

Ovaj blog post je najveća umjetnička forma 20. stoljeća.

Graver dette indhold.

Bu blogu herkesin okuması gerekiyor.

Całkowicie zaskoczyło mnie więcej artykułów, proszę.

Уау, този блог беше невероятен.

Όλοι πρέπει να είναι γρήγοροι στο να ακούσουν, να αργήσουν να μιλήσουν και να αργήσουν να θυμώσουν. Φαίνεται στα γραπτά σου.

Simplemente no podía dejar de leer este contenido.

Iets waar ik niet genoeg aan doe, is commentaar geven op hetzelfde onderwerp waar ik zojuist over heb geschreven op basis van mijn eigen persoonlijke ervaring.

有史以来最好的文章！

Bazen bir tür güvenlik ve tutarlılık için can atsam da, bir şekilde ortalıkta dolandırılmaktan zevk alıyorum. Bu yılı bırakın, önümüzdeki hafta bazen neler olduğunu gerçekten bilmiyorum.

Fin artikkel liker å lese.

Myślę, że ludzie czują się zagrożeni tym tematem. Problem nie dotyczy tego tematu per se, problemem jest stosunek do niego.

Diese Artikel waren bemerkenswert.

Du kan vise den påskønnelse på store og små måder. Det er ofte de små ting, der virkelig tæller og vil lægge op til et stabilt, kærligt og gensidigt fordelagtigt forhold.

Objavljivanje takvog informativnog članka može pomoći svakom pridošlicu u ovom polju.

A blogod olvasása során olyan pillanatokat kapok, amikor elcsípem magam, némelyikük eléggé érzelmessé tesz.

บทความที่น่าตื่นตาตื่นใจโดยสิ้นเชิง

Ezek a cikkek szenzációsak voltak.

Ord alene kan ikke fullt ut formidle sjelens realiteter eller storheten til den menneskelige ånd. Takk for det du skriver.

Совершенно потрясающий блог.

ฉันต้องการให้คุณรู้ว่าฉันให้ความสำคัญกับการสนับสนุนของคุณมากแค่ไหน

Tengo esta teoría de que, dependiendo de tu actitud, tu vida no tiene por qué convertirse en esta farsa ridícula que parece que tanta gente termina viviendo.

这个题目太棒了！

Một nghịch lý của việc già đi là khi tôi có ít thời gian hơn trên trái đất, tôi không cảm thấy quá vội vàng.

Трябва да овладеете не само изкуството да слушате главата си, но също така трябва да овладеете да слушате сърцето си и червата си.

Il n'y a pas de préjugé que des sujets comme ceux-ci ne parviennent pas à surmonter définitivement.

Élvezettel olvastam a fenti cikket, tényleg mindent részletesen elmagyaráz.

이 기사를 읽고 그립습니다.

Anda telah melakukan pekerjaan yang fantastis. Saya pasti akan secara pribadi merekomendasikannya kepada teman-teman saya.

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