Are you evaluating whether to enter or exit new markets?
Do you need to stengthen your competitive positioning?
Do you face growing threats from new and incubment competitors?
Do you want to become the #1 or #2 player in target markets?
Do you need to accelerate growth to achieve financial goals?
Would you like to create a more robust innovation pipeline?
Do strategic initiatives exceed budget and miss deadlines?
Do you struggle with implementing agile at scale?
Are initiatives slow to surface and address execution risks?
Please reach out to learn more about how we've driven meaningful impact for clients, and how we can create a customized approach for your specific business situation. We've outlined our core offerings below.
Growth requires more than creativity - it requires robust processes and capabilities. Our growth diagnostic can help you assess your processes and capabilities, and help you identify specific opportunities for incremental growth. Our growth diagnostic assesses your:
Step 1: We begin by assessing your current growth trajectory across major business units. We analyze the sources of growth, including share of wallet expansion, new customer acquisition, new products, and new markets.
Step 2: Next, we survey senior executives with targeted questions to understand the strength of existing growth processes and capabilities.
Step 3: Finally, we share the quantiative and qualitative analysis with senior executives, along with preliminary perspectives on growth opportunities. We refine the prioritization of these growth opportunities in collaboration with senior executives.
Most organizations only look a few years into the future. Scenario planning provides a long-term perspective. It's about looking a decade or more into the future, exploring possible futures, and assessing their long-term implications - both threats and opportunities - for an organization.
We have a robust, structured scenario development process that has proven highly effective within large organizations. At the heart of the process is the framing of scenarios around the most critical uncertainties faced by the organization. The key steps are as follows:
Please contact us to learn more about how we've used this approach in practice.
Strategy is fundamentally about making choices that create a differentiated market position. It sounds easy, but is very hard in practice. Why? Because it involves challenging trade-offs. A shift in strategy requires not only deciding "what to do", but also deciding "what not to do". The organization must put in place a set of inter-locking activities that support their strategic choices. The self-reinforcing nature of the entire activity system makes it hard for competitors to replicate.
The core of our strategy development process involves addressing five strategic questions:
We take a flexible and highly collaborative approach, involving key stakeholders in a process which is adapted to your specific needs. At the heart of the process we define strategic choices, identify key assumptions, and test those assumptions through in-depth research and analysis. Please get in touch to learn about how we've used this approach to align leadership teams around a compelling strategy.
We believe there are five key components that need to be part of any business case:
Most business cases focus heavily on the supply side - detailing the internal costs of building the new product or business. We take a venture capital perspective to business cases, placing equal focus on validating customer demand and unit economics.
Our approach to developing business cases addresses areas which are often neglected:
Deep market understanding is the foundation for developing a robust strategy. Self-driving cars provide a good analogy. 2005 was a breakthrough year. Stanley (pictured above) was the first driverless car to complete a 100+ mile course through the desert. It wasn't the most powerful or fastest car. It was the car with the most sophisticated ability to sense the external environment, separate signal from noise, and make sense of incoming information.
We have performed market analysis focused on:
To gather market insights, we leverage our extensive partnerships. We work with industry experts to gather deep insight into the market and key competitors, and we use a third-party market intelligence platform to source a broad range of market data and market reports. We'll share key insights as we progress through the research phase so that we can refine our focus to make sure we extract the most valuable market insights.
Multimodal customer research (e.g., interviews + customer survey + focus groups) is typically the ideal solution if time and budget allows. The right combination of research tools depends on the context. However, here's one effective model:
Most firms will outsource most steps in this process to a market research firm. We will make a decision on which steps to outsource based on the specific business situation. If needed, we have the capabilities to execute the entire market research process in-house.
Defining the value that we're providing to customers is the foundation of product strategy. Consider Tesla and Toyota. Tesla is focused on delivering customer value through product leadership. It focuses on open communication and innovation. Toyota is known for operational efficiency and quality control. It focuses on the quest for continuous improvement through Kaizen. The way that each firm delivers value is fundamentally different.
For every product we need to be clear about whether aiming to provide the best product, the best solution, the lowest cost offering, or the most convenient offering.
Step 1: We start by defining the value that we're delivering to customers. This has to be defined in relation to the value that competitors are delivery, so customer and competitor analysis if often a component of this phase.
Step 2: We next consider the processes and capabilities needed to deliver that value to customers. We would typically assess existing processes and capabilities, and identify gaps that need to be closed.
Step 3: Finally, we aim to translate the product strategy into an executable product roadmap. In most cases, we won't be starting with a blank sheet of paper. We need to integrate top-down strategic considerations with product developments that may either be in-flight or may have been committed to publicly or to indiviudal clients.
Go-to-market strategy should be aligned with our growth objectives. The focus will differe significantly depending on the extent to which we expect growth to come from share of wallet epansion, new client acquisition, adjacent market, or entirely new markets.
There are three key components to our approach to go-to-market strategy:
Technology strategy should follow business strategy. For cost leaders, technology can enable further automation of routine processes. For product leaders, technology can be a primary driver of innovation. The key focus should be on how technology can advance our business strategy and the level of impact that it can have. While this sounds obvious, it's easy to get distracted by the "hype cycle" and focus on the latest technology developments, regardless of their potential for business impact.
We help firms with three discrete components of technology strategy:
Innovation in popular culture is coming up with the next breakthrough idea. For most firms, this kind of transformational innovation is not the primary innovation focus. The focus of innovation - invention, commercialization, or exploitation - will depend on whether your broader business and product strategy.
Our innovation process cover the three major stages of innovation:
At the core of this process is an agile "test and learn" approach to incubation.
Transformation Management should be much more than a simple rebarnding of traditional program management. The fundamental difference is that program management is primarily focused on delivering on-time and on-budget; transformation management is focused on delivering desired business outcomes. In practice, the difference is that Transoformation Management activities are designed top-down to meet the needs of senior executives. (In contrast, program management tends to be designed bottom-up, based on the indiviudal project objectives.)
We can help you create a Transformation Management Office from scratch, or improve the effectiveness of your existing transformation management activities. We use a player-coach model where we'll be actively involved in the execution of transformation while we're designing upgraded processes and building new tools. Large programs with many projects can carry a heavy administrative burden to track progress and financial results. We can develop highly-automted tools that will minimize the administrative burden.
Half of M&A transactions don't create shareholder value. The reasons are complex, but academic studies point to two major reasons: post-deal integration planning and execution and the quality of pre-deal market due diligence. In a competitive M&A market, inadequate due diligence often leads to an optimistic evluation of the target firm. Hence, the winner's curse! We believe in a hypothesis-driven approach that stress-tests the deal thesis through focused customer research.
Our hypothesis-driven approach is customized for every deal. We draw on a broad range of tools and information sources in our due dilligance process. Our CDD toolkit includes: