Why Most Businesses Have No Strategy
All businesses have a brand. All have a product. All have people, sales, marketing, and various other building blocks which add up to “a company”. But not all – in fact very few – have a strategy. I don’t mean to say here that most businesses have bad strategies (though quite a lot do). I […]
Nike and the concept of “cultural innovation”
When I want to make a point about strategy, I often refer to a famous brand in order to do it. So does everyone of course, and because there are so few brands out there who are strategically interesting, the same names always get repeated. To be honest I always feel a bit embarrassed to […]
The journey to irreplaceable: how F&B brands can own their position on shelf
Coke famously started life as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany’s was a stationery store. Nokia, a paper mill. Together they represent particularly acute examples of a truth that applies to all companies: They evolve into something they didn’t intend. Nobody knows this better than food and bev brands. It’s exceptionally rare for an initial concept to […]
What does a strong value offering look like?
There are only two directions a business can take to build a strong value offering: 1 – Enhancing an existing value the market 2 – Bringing a new value to the market Generally speaking, 1 is weak and 2 is strong. As I’ve argued many times before, delivering a greater degree of something is far less […]
The most important metric
When I was around 15, me and a pal went to see the movie Collateral, starring Tom Cruise. In it Cruise played a colder-than-ice assassin on the streets of a neo-noir Los Angeles. Sufficed to say we were pretty impressed. So much so in fact that my friend briefly experimented with modelling his personal […]
The most powerful market force nobody talks about
The other day on Twitter, a chap asked a perfectly reasonable question: “Zoom is now worth $130B and I still don’t know what their moat is. Brand?” His question is a variation of the critique that has been put to many a founder when seeking investment. “What’s to stop someone coming and copying you?”. The […]
Don’t plan for the future, plan for the past
Strategy is traditionally seen as a forward-looking exercise. This stands to reason since, in the words of my pal Robin Bonn, every strategy is essentially a “bet” that a certain course of action will work out in the future. We think that X is going to happen and therefore we are going to do Y […]
A definition of insight that’s actually useful
Really you’ve got to feel sorry for insight. This poor little word is so abused and misunderstood that it’s a wonder that it’s managed to survive this long. But then perhaps that’s its strength? It’s so nebulous that it can mean whatever you want it to mean – and nobody understands it quite well enough […]
Beyond success: the anatomy of greatness
Consider the gap represented by these comparisons: HP vs. Apple James Milner vs. Eric Cantona Avatar vs. 2001: A Space Odyssey Wladimir Klitschko vs. Muhammad Ali In each case, you have two things that are both incredibly successful, and yet the latter examples possess a quality that the former – even if they’re more successful […]
The inherent danger of strategy
“The opposite of success is not failure but mediocrity”. I was really struck by this quote by Michael E. Raynor as I think it reveals an important principle in strategic decision making. His point was that strategic behaviour – defined as utter commitment to a specific path – not only increases your chances of massive […]