A Riff on Strategy...What's Your Take?

Hi!

I read a blog that stuck with me this week about “riffs”.

So I’m going to drop a riff in here about strategy this week to build off last week’s discussion of strategy errors.

Today, I want to riff on some of the lessons I’ve learned about strategy and what they will mean going forward.

So, where to begin?

First, we begin with how I think about strategy…and the way I learned to think about strategy is by looking at the idea through the lens of the question: “Why do some businesses fail and others succeed?”

I learned this question from Dr. Kamal Munir.

A deeper question becomes: Is it repeatable? Or, is it a one-time thing?

You can tell this by looking at patterns.

Patterns of activities that repeat themselves.

Patterns such as understanding that an organization that is trying to do too much often fails like we’ve seen over the years when a business like Ford had too many models or Coke trying to manage over 100 brands of beverages.

A pattern like we are seeing right now in streaming where there are so many streamers and many of them don’t have a true “target market” and “value proposition” fit.

Or, like when you see sports tickets priced too high only to find discounts galore everywhere you look after a short time.

What else do we need to know?

We need to understand the impact of power in strategy.

Good strategies help give businesses more power in their market by gaining power against their customers, their competition, or their supply chain.

We are also seeing a lot of those deep rooted competitive advantages go away.

One spot I’m baffled by is whether or not “blue oceans” really exist.

In my thinking, the idea is kind of bogus…because the most important thing is relative differentiation.

In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

You are competing on similar ground, no matter what you are up to.

True innovation happens irregularly and we are seeing even less innovation than we have historically, largely due to the amount of market consolidation that has happened and cuts to government research and development programs.

Where am I going with this riff?

I think to a place where I consider that beginning question again: Why do some businesses succeed and others fail?

And, I think that there often isn’t one clear reason for it.

You might have a good process. You might have good people. You also might have luck.

I guess I’ll have to keep looking.

What do you think?

Dave

PS: the blog suggested sending this to 3-5 people to start a conversation. Instead, I’m sending it to you.

But I’ll also publish some of these kinds of ideas to my blog at www.DaveWakeman.com a little more regularly.