As presented in the previous posts, yet in the early 1990s, Moen Corporation, located in North Olmsted, Ohio, found itself in a challenging situation. The company was losing market share and not positioned well for the changes that were beginning to take place in the market. To transform the company in order for it to grow, newly installed CEO, Bruce Carbonari, implemented a range of reforming strategies which brought fruitful successes. However, the company did not have a reliable process for the identification of new products. They needed a way to determine a corporate strategy and accompanying product plan that would help them to meet the higher growth rate they desired. Two teams (i) Project Periscope Team and (ii) the Extended Periscope team have been formed in order to move a plumbing fixtures company to a new level of excitement and innovation in the industry. Besides, some more strategies are also utilized. (This post is excerpted from The power of strategy innovation : a new way of linking creativity and strategic planning to discover great business opportunities by Robert E. Johnston, Jr., and J. Douglas Bate.)

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If you want to position your products effectively in a crowded market and against market leaders, take into account the following action strategies: (i) Select a competitive advantage that larger competitors cannot perform efficiently; (ii) Commit to quality and service as an organizational priority; (iii) Focus on speciality products that command premium prices; leave the commodity price segment to others – unless you are the low-cost producer in your industry; (iv) Establish long-term alliances with customers to grow with them and to build technology and product relationships; (v) Maintain a market-driven orientation within your immediate group and throughout your organization (if within your authority) to maintain a competitive advantage.; (vi) Seek global opportunities that complement long-term objectives; (vii) Partner sales people with customers to provide product solutions to customers’ problems; (viii) 8. Identify market niches that are emerging, neglected, or poorly served.

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According to William E. Fulmer and Jack Goodwin, although there are financial implications in the concept of bonding (learn more about bonding at “Differentiation: Begin with the Consumer - an Introduction”), the operating and strategic implications are at least as great - if not more important.

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According to Mark Thomas, Gary Miles, and Peter Fisk, vital roles of the CEO is to identify, develop and protect the key building blocks with which future business models will be built. It is all very well talking of future business models and future value created. The problem for CEOs is that they are under intense pressure to deliver value here and now. Driving current performance is a key role of the CEO, and it frequently requires taking tough decisions. The most difficult area is where the protection of the building blocks for the future is sub-optimizing current performance: what should the CEO do? The answer is hard but simple: do not sacrifice the future to achieve short-term success unless the very existence of the firm is under threat. Very few of the capabilities and resources will be truly critical – be absolutely clear which are the few critical ones; it will be far easier to decide what to sacrifice. (Excerpted from The Complete CEO: The Executive’s Guide to Consistent Peak Performance by Mark Thomas, Gary Miles, and Peter Fisk)

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[yellow tail], like Cirque du Soleil and SouthWest Airlines, created a unique and exceptional value curve to unlock a blue ocean. When expressed through a value curve, then, an effective blue ocean strategy like [yellow tail]’s has three complementary qualities: focus, divergence, and a compelling tagline. Without these qualities, a company’s strategy will likely be muddled, undifferentiated, and hard to communicate with a high cost structure. The four actions of creating a new value curve should be well guided toward building a company’s strategic profile with these characteristics. These three characteristics serve as an initial litmus test of the commercial viability of blue ocean ideas. (excerpted from “Blue Ocean Strategy, how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant“, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)

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(This post is excerpted from “Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates” by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson.) According to Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson, one of three critical preconditions for making breakthroughs happen is maximizing diversity. A lot of discussion is going on in corporate circles these days about ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. If it’s not a big deal in your own company or geographic region yet, chances are it soon will be. Compliance with government legislation and political correctness are not the only issues driving this new push for diversity. It’s also very much about the globalization of business. It’s about the need to understand and leverage the rapidly changing demographics of customers, markets, and employees around the world. Luke Visconti, partner and cofounder of Diversity Inc magazine, says, “If you want to compete globally, you have to understand that 80% of the globe isn’t white and 50% isn’t rnale.” That’s a big reason why a string of global companies-from PepsiCo to P&G to GE-have made it a strategic priority to diversify and globalize their leadership teams. However, what is really crucial in the composition of innovation teams is not just the ability to connect various genders, races, cultures, and ethnicities; it’s the ability to connect people with different skill sets, capabilities, and perspectives.

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Organizations and the industries in which they operate are embedded in a broad environment, which can significantly impact the competitiveness of both industries and organizations. The starting point then of any strategic analysis is some form of environmental analysis- generally STEEP/PEST analysis-followed by Industry Analysis or Porter’s Five Forces, which together provide a structural framework outlining an industry and a unique and perhaps more holistic perspective on a firm’s competitiveness. Post “Industry Analysis Technique: The Nine Forces (Part 1)” has presented firm’s environment and the approach by which it may be strategically and competitively analyzed. Accordingly, to perform the Nine forces analysis, an analyst needs to address the three basic levels of organizational environments: the general environment, the operating or industry environment, and the internal environment. This post will look at the strategic rationale and its implication as well as strength and weakness of the methods.

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Let’s start with the assumption that markets are an economic structure. They perform the function of trading one product, service, or currency for another. Each product, service, and currency has a value. What you want in new markets is to build the combination of products or services that has the highest possible value—value to the customer, not just to the provider. This results, often, in a product in search of a problem to solve. But…

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That has been the marketing mantra for the past two decades, and although great strides have been made as a result of the customer-driven movement, the voice that managers are listening to needs to be silenced in order for marketing and development to be more successful. It is no longer sufficient for managers to simply gather customer requirements. Rather, they must know precisely what types of information are needed and what types of information they are collecting in order to create a more accountable model of innovation. As in most disciplines, managers need a common language around which to discuss issues and build a shared understanding. The innovation process is no different. Knowing that jobs, outcomes, and constraints are desired inputs and that solutions, specifications, needs, and benefit statements hinder the successful execution of the innovation process gives managers a new language to consider when talking with external and internal customers. (This post is excerpted from “What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services” by Anthony Ulwick.)

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In a HBR article (“Bottom-Feeding for Blockbuster Businesses”, which took a close look at bottom-feeders-companies, David Rosenblum, Doug Tomlinson and Larry Scott have offered some lessons to transform your own industry’s unprofitable, market segments into lucrative ones-if you’re willing to stop looking at so called bad customers as pariahs and start looking at them as untapped opportunities. One lesson is redesigning the business model. According to Rosenblum, Tomlinson and Scott, making a profit on underserved customers required a new business model-usually a pared-down product offering and a streamlined way of selling and delivering it. These companies shared a number of characteristics: (i) A Simplified Offering; (ii) Minimal Marketing Expenses; (iii) Personal, Convenient, and Pleasant Service; (iv) Judicious Use of Technology; (v) Structural Efficiencies; Realistic Financial Targets.

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In a HBR article (“Bottom-Feeding for Blockbuster Businesses”, which took a close look at bottom-feeders-companies, David Rosenblum, Doug Tomlinson and Larry Scott have offered some lessons to transform your own industry’s unprofitable, market segments into lucrative ones-if you’re willing to stop looking at so called bad customers as pariahs and start looking at them as untapped opportunities. One lesson is redesigning the business model. According to Rosenblum, Tomlinson and Scott, making a profit on underserved customers required a new business model-usually a pared-down product offering and a streamlined way of selling and delivering it. These companies shared a number of characteristics: (i) A Simplified Offering; (ii) Minimal Marketing Expenses; (iii) Personal, Convenient, and Pleasant Service; (iv) Judicious Use of Technology; (v) Structural Efficiencies; Realistic Financial Targets.

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Although there are examples of firms successfully employing a highly differentiated strategy seemingly without much regard for cost (Hewlett Packard in calculators, for example), and others that have dominated an industry for some period of time with a virtually undifferentiated product at the lowest possible cost (such as Texas Instruments), these easily perceived extremes are rare in practice. A problem with the either/or approach is that most of us know firms that seem to fit both categories. Using the either/or approach of cost vs. differentiation provides little help in distinguishing the players in most industries. Most firms cluster toward the middle of the low-cost/high-differentiation spectrum. As a result, most of the major airlines offer a relatively similar product to the customer, both in characteristics and cost. In this middle ground, where most companies in many industries seem to fall, arises the greatest confusion about strategy.

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According to Constantinos Markides, there are six simple but fundamental principles underlying every breakthrough strategy. One of these principles is to choose a unique strategic position for the company. In every industry, there are several viable positions that companies can occupy. The essence of strategy is, therefore, to choose the one position that our company will claim as its own. Strategy is all about choosing and a company will be successful only if it chooses a distinctive (i.e. different from competitors’) strategic position.

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Although there are examples of firms successfully employing a highly differentiated strategy seemingly without much regard for cost (Hewlett Packard in calculators, for example), and others that have dominated an industry for some period of time with a virtually undifferentiated product at the lowest possible cost (such as Texas Instruments), these easily perceived extremes are rare in practice. A problem with the either/or approach is that most of us know firms that seem to fit both categories. Using the either/or approach of cost vs. differentiation provides little help in distinguishing the players in most industries. Most firms cluster toward the middle of the low-cost/high-differentiation spectrum. As a result, most of the major airlines offer a relatively similar product to the customer, both in characteristics and cost. In this middle ground, where most companies in many industries seem to fall, arises the greatest confusion about strategy.

More: continued here
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According to Constantinos Markides, there are six simple but fundamental principles underlying every breakthrough strategy. One of these principles is to choose a unique strategic position for the company. In every industry, there are several viable positions that companies can occupy. The essence of strategy is, therefore, to choose the one position that our company will claim as its own. Strategy is all about choosing and a company will be successful only if it chooses a distinctive (i.e. different from competitors’) strategic position.

More: continued here

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