Whether you want to revive sluggish growth, reverse a decline, enable a takeoff, or scale up a business, one need to be able to answer 3 questions about performance and results: Why was it like that? Where it is currently heading? How to get where we want?
Setting a winning growth strategy requires an accurate and thorough understanding of the underlying dynamics to make pertinent, effective, and coherent changes.
Explain the fundamental reasons for the evolution of past performance and results to date. Predict with accuracy where this will lead under the current strategy and operating model. Determine with confidence what really needs to be done to improve performance and obtain desired results in the future.
Holding a competitive advantage requires delivering greater value to customers and creating it more cost effectively than competitors.
Strategic differentiation can be achieved in 3 ways by focusing on strong product leadership, high operational excellence, or in-depth customer intimacy. Their choice or combination requires a specific strategic focus and operational framework.
Define which of these 3 types of differentiated value you primarily provide to your customers in your respective markets. For this mode of differentiation, find ways to raise the bar to fulfill customers’ expectations beyond what the competition can do. Become a champion in this differentiation strategy while meeting market standards in the other two to gain such a lead that competitors will find it hard to catch up. Built accordingly a relevant, effective, and coherent business model that can deliver more of this value than competitors and at a lower cost.
Excellence is a journey that must be truly decided, proactively pursued, and intelligent executed and if we are to achieve greater competitiveness year after years.
Flexibility, adaptability, anticipation, responsiveness, and inventiveness, in addition to efficiency, are the distinguishing characteristics of high-performing agile organizations and the most important attributes for your long-term success.
Rigorously and comprehensively assess your organization’s level of excellence in terms of achieved results, existing barriers, and current practices against a recognized excellence framework. Identify potential improvement initiatives to remove barriers and implement required best practices. Prioritize these initiatives based on implementation difficulty, business value and financial effort required. Select the most relevant ones, plan their implementation, and assign metrics to track their expected outcomes.
Strategic maneuvers and operations are inherently nonlinear systems that can often give rise to unintended and unexpected consequences.
Effective management of strategy and operational risks requires a systemic approach to cope with volatility, deal with uncertainty, master complexity, and overcome ambiguity.
Understand complex causal dependencies and feedback loops to identify potential threats and counterproductive effects. Elicit managerial biases of seeing the world as one would like it to be rather than as it actually is or could possibly become. Recognize patterns of behavior that derive from systemic structures. Find effective ways to reduce the likelihood of risk events or mitigate their consequences with appropriate interventions on the overall system.