Why Positive Differentiating Behaviors Are Difficult to Imitate

2008-11-07

If positive behavioral differentiators create an invisible, attractive bond between buyers and sellers, and negative behavioral differentiators create an opposite, repulsive force, then it should be obvious to everyone that behaving well is good for business. Why doesn’t everyone do it? Why isn’t every company, professional firm, and corner drugstore a model of behavioral differentiation? The answer is that it takes more skill, will, and leadership than most organizations have. That’s why the companies that are able to consistently create BD are truly exceptional. The enigma isn’t that leaders don’t know what to do; the enigma is that they know what to do but don’t do it.

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Initiating the Discovery Process: Key Roles in the Discovery Process - Sponsor

Participation in the Discovery Process will vary for each corporation based primarily on its size and reporting structure. For a small company with fewer layers of management, members of the senior management team would be directly involved in the process. In the case of smaller companies, the Discovery team needs only to select a cross-functional team and appoint a team captain. In larger corporations with much more complex organization charts, the selection of the team and identification of roles requires more careful consideration. The primary reason for this is that Discovery team members who search for and create the new business opportunities will be different from the company’s strategy decision makers. This requires the identification of a role (such as sponsor) that will act as a liaison between these two groups to help keep them aligned. According to Robert E. Johnston, Jr., and J. Douglas Bate, when planning a strategy innovation initiative, sponsor whose primary roles in this Discovery Process include (i) Liaison; (ii) Mentor; (iii) spokesperson, is one of are some roles that are crucial for success.

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Formulating Blue Ocean Strategy: The Blue Ocean Idea Index

Although companies should build their blue ocean strategy in the sequence of utility, price, cost, and adoption, these criteria form an integral whole to ensure commercial success. The blue ocean idea (BOI) index provides a simple but robust test of this system view. This post will match the failure of Philips’ CD-i and Motorola’s Iridium and the success of DoCoMo’s i-Mode to the blue ocean idea (BOI) index.

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Strategic Choices in the Winner-Take-All Game

The most glorious successes and the most dramatic failures in business have been associated with the pursuit of a dominant position in a winner-take-all market. According to professor Rita Gunther McGrath, a competitive space will not be a winner-take-all category without a changed basis for competition; customer lock-in and competitor lock-out. Further, that company strategies will tend to shape whether these conditions will emerge. Gaining the lead in such markets will further depend upon where the greatest value is being created. In new areas, a new solution and a provider that can deliver it completely have the strongest chances. When non-proprietary standards are beginning to emerge and the market horizontalizes, those players who are most adept at establishing their technologies as standards for one or another layer of the solution have a chance to win.

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Building a Foundation of Novel Strategic Insights: Leveraging Competencies and Assets

Radical innovators tend to view their companies not as business units or organization charts, but as portfolios of competencies and strategic assets. Usually, it’s difficult to see things like skills, processes, technologies, assets, and values as distinct, stand-alone entities because they are completely embedded in a company’s current business model. But radical innovators have the ability to decouple particular skills and assets from the existing business and then leverage them in their own right to generate growth opportunities. The fact is, radical innovators tend to think of the whole world as a Lego kit of different competencies and strategic assets, owned by different companies, which can potentially be reconnected like building blocks or used in a new context to invent novel products, processes, services, and business models.

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Key to Getting to the Right Business Problem: Informational Interviews

Just as in diagnosing a technical problem, the key to getting to the right business problem is to ask the right questions. One process for this is the informational interview model. In this model, you find your target prospective clients and ask them questions. The informational interview model has six steps that, taken together, define a roadmap for examining a business market. The informational interview is built on six principles that reinforce the six steps shown in the sidebar figure in the process and are the keys to making the process works (i) Look for people whom you would normally not approach, as well as people whom you would; (ii) No selling is allowed. These are not customers; they are information sources you value; (iii) Ask few questions, and none about products. Ask only about problems; (iv) Do not offer solutions, no matter how tempted you are; (v) Listen more, talk less. Bury your ego; (vi)If you do not have time to do the interview right, hire someone who can

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Maneuver by Indirect Strategy: The Power of Indirect Strategy

2008-11-06

Seemingly unimposing by name, the indirect strategy endures as the indomitable rule that consistently towers as one of the vital ingredients of a business plan. The indirect strategy operates on three dimensions. First, the strategy is anchored to a line of action whereby you apply your strength against a competitor’s weakness. The essence of the move is to maneuver so that your rival cannot, will not, or simply lacks the capability to challenge your efforts. Second, concurrent with activating indirect moves against a competitor, you focus your attention on serving customers’ needs or resolving their problems in a manner that outperforms your competitors’ actions. Third, you aim to achieve a psychological advantage by creating an unbalancing effect in the mind of the rival manager. That is, by means of distractions and false moves you make it appear that you are launching your effort directly at the competitor’s strengths. However, your true purpose is to target his vulnerabilities.

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