Category Archives: Strategy

Is Your Innovation Strategy on Track?

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Is Your Innovation Strategy on Track?

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

A solid innovation strategy is key to setting your organization up for long-term success. But how do you know if you’re on the right path? Here are a few signs that your innovation strategy is sound – and some KPI/metrics tips to guide you along the way.

1. Alignment with Corporate Strategy

A strong innovation strategy doesn’t stand alone—it’s integrated with the overall corporate strategy. While innovation teams often lean more visionary, the core business balances daily execution with future growth. Finding the “sweet spot” between these perspectives helps shape an innovation strategy that is bold yet achievable.

KPI/metrics: Strategic alignment score. Are innovation initiatives aligned with overall business goals and timelines? Does the strategy push far enough to create the future, but close enough to today’s realities?

2. Clarity on Innovation Type

It’s critical to know what type of innovation your organization is pursuing. Incremental innovation? Breakthrough or radical? Or perhaps you’re aiming for “in-between” innovation – meaningful advancement without the high stakes of disruptive change.

KPI/metrics: Track innovation project distribution across types (incremental, in-between, breakthrough). Are you focusing on the sweet spot for your capabilities?

3. Understanding of Ecosystem Dynamics

In-between innovation, where companies push beyond small improvements but not into complete market disruption, often benefits from ecosystem collaboration. This means tapping into external assets and building alliances that complement internal capabilities.

KPI/metrics: Number and quality of ecosystem partnerships. How many productive partnerships are helping you access needed assets or knowledge?

Six Innovation Models by BCG

4. Balance Between Vision and Reality

The innovation team may lean toward bold, future-shaping ideas, while the core business focuses on today’s realities. A sound strategy balances both perspectives – pushing boundaries while staying feasible within current business structures.

KPI/metrics: Time-to-market for innovation projects. Are projects moving efficiently from concept to market, indicating a practical balance between vision and execution?

5. Talent and Skills Alignment

A clear innovation strategy should inform talent requirements. Are the right skills and roles in place to support the type of innovation you’re aiming for?

KPI/metrics: Skills gap analysis for innovation-related roles. Does your team have the capabilities needed to bring your strategy to life?

6. Adaptability and Resilience

Innovation doesn’t follow a straight line. A sound strategy allows for flexibility and quick pivots based on market feedback, technology shifts, and emerging opportunities.

KPI/metrics: Percentage of innovation projects adapted or redirected based on feedback. How adaptable is your team in responding to change?

Your innovation strategy should guide you in defining what’s possible, aligning with your corporate strategy, and fostering a collaborative yet grounded approach. The right KPIs help you measure progress and ensure alignment with your strategic vision.

I hope this shorter post can help spur some reflection and raise some guiding questions for your efforts and initiatives.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance

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Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Max Planck’s work in physics changed the way we were able to see the universe. Still, even he complained that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

For most transformational efforts we need to pursue, we simply don’t have that kind of time. To drive significant change we have to overcome staunch resistance. Unfortunately, most change management strategies assume that opposition can be overcome through communication efforts that are designed to persuade.

This assumes that resistance always has a rational basis and clearly that’s not true. We all develop emotional attachments to ideas. When we feel those are threatened, it offends our dignity, identity and sense of self. If we are going to overcome our most fervent opponents we don’t need a better argument, we need a strategy. Here are three approaches that work:

Strategy 1: Designate An Internal Red Team

Resistance is never monolithic. While some people have irrational attachments based on their sense of identity and dignity, others are merely skeptical. One key difference between these two groups is that the irrational resistors rarely voice their opposition, but try to quietly sabotage change. The rational skeptics, on the other hand, are much more eager to engage.

While these are different groups, they often interact with each other behind the scenes. In many cases, it is the active, irrational opposition that is fueling the skeptics’ doubts. One useful strategy for dealing with this dynamic is to co-opt the opposition by setting up an internal red team to channel skepticism in a constructive way.

Red-teaming is a process in which an adversarial team is set up to poke holes in an operational or strategic plan. For example, red teams are used in airports and computer systems to see if they can find weaknesses in security. The military uses red teams to test battle plans. Perhaps most famously, a red team was used to help determine whether the conclusions that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout were valid or if there was some other explanation.

Recruiting skeptics to be an internal red team provides two benefits. First, they can alert you to actual problems with your ideas, which you can then fix. Second, they not only voice their own objections, but also bring those of the irrational opposition out into the open (remember, irrational resisters rarely speak out.)

What’s key here is to make the distinction between rational skeptics and the irrational saboteurs. Engage with skeptics, leave the saboteurs to themselves.

Strategy 2: Don’t Engage And Quietly Gain Traction

Have you ever had this happen?: You’re in a meeting where things are moving slowly towards a consensus. Issues are discussed, objections raised and solutions devised. Toward the end of the meeting, just as things are shifting gears to next steps, somebody who had hardly said a word the whole time all of a sudden throws a hissy fit in the middle of the conference room and completely discredits themself.

There’s a reason why this happens. Remember saboteurs are not acting rationally. They have emotional attachments that they often can’t articulate, which is why they rarely give voice to their objections, but rather look for more discreet opportunities to derail the process. When they see things moving forward, they panic.

This doesn’t happen just in conference rooms. Those who are trying to sabotage change prefer to lurk in the background and hope they can quietly derail it. But when they see genuine progress being made, they will likely lash out, overreach and inadvertently further your cause.

This behavior is incredibly consistent. In fact, whenever I’m speaking to a group of transformation and change professionals and I describe this phenomenon to them, I always get people coming up to me afterwards. “I didn’t know that was a normal thing, I thought it was just something crazy that happened in our case!”

It’s important to resist the urge to respond to every attack. You don’t need to waste precious time and energy engaging with those who want to derail your initiative, which is more likely to frustrate and exhaust you than anything else. It’s much better to focus on empowering those who support change. Non-engagement can be a viable way to deal with opposition.

Strategy 3: Design A Dilemma Action

I once had a six-month assignment to restructure the sales and marketing operations of a troubled media company and the Sales Director was a real stumbling block. She never overtly objected, but would rather nod her head and then quietly sabotage progress. For example, she promised to hand over the clients she worked directly with to her staff, but never seemed to get around to it.

It was obvious that she intended to slow-walk everything until the six months were over and then return everything back to the way it was. As a longtime senior employee, she had considerable political capital within the organization and, because she was never directly insubordinate, creating a direct confrontation with her would be risky and unwise.

So rather than create a conflict, I designed a dilemma. I arranged with the CEO of a media buying agency for one of the salespeople to meet with a senior buyer and take over the account. The Sales Director had two choices. She could either let the meeting go ahead and lose her grip on the department or try to derail the meeting. She chose the latter and was fired for cause. Once she was gone, her mismanagement became obvious and sales shot up.

Dilemma actions have been around for at least a century. One early example was Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels who picketed the Wilson White House with his own quotes in 1917. More recently, the tactic has been the subject of increasing academic interest. What’s becoming clear is that these actions share clear design principles that can be replicated in almost any context.

Key to the success of a dilemma action is that it is seen as a constructive act rooted in a shared value. In the case of the Sales Director, she had agreed to give up her accounts and setting up the meeting was aligned with that agreement. That’s what created the dilemma. She had to choose between violating the shared value or giving up her resistance.

How Change Really Happens

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it is an exercise in persuasion. Yet anyone who has ever been married or had kids knows how hard it can be to convince even a single person of something they don’t want to be convinced about. Seeking to persuade hundreds or thousands to change what they think or how they act is a tall order indeed.

The truth is that radical, transformational change is achieved when not when those who oppose it are convinced, but when they discredit themselves. It was the brutality of Bull Connor’s tactics in Birmingham that paved the way for the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It was Russia’s poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 that set Ukraine on a different path. The passage of Proposition 8 in California created such controversy that it actually furthered the cause of same-sex marriage.

We find the same dynamic in our work with organizational transformations. Whenever you set out to make a significant impact, there will always be people who will hate the idea and seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Once you are able to internalize that you are ready to move forward.

Through sound strategies, you can learn to leverage opposition to further your change initiative. You can co-opt those who are rationally skeptical to find flaws in your idea that can be fixed. For those who are adamantly and irrationally opposed to an initiative, there are proven strategies that help lead them to discredit themselves.

The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The difference between successful revolutionaries and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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When You Don’t Have What the Customer Wants

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When You Don't Have What the Customer Wants

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I recently responded to a question on LinkedIn: A customer is furious about an out-of-stock item. How do you turn their frustration into satisfaction?

I added a second part to that question. What if what the customer wants is something you’ve never had in stock? Some customers might still be angry that you do not have what they want. And even if they aren’t, whether the item is out of stock or you just don’t carry it, that doesn’t mean you can’t make the customer happy.

Before we go further, let me do a very quick recap of how to deal with any upset or complaining customer. This is my five-step process for handling complaints:

  1. Apologize for the problem.
  2. Acknowledge what the problem is.
  3. Discuss the resolution. (In a moment, I’ll cover this in detail.)
  4. Accept ownership. It may not be your fault, but now you own taking care of the customer.
  5. Act with urgency.

So, back to #3, the resolution. Is the item the customer wants temporarily out of stock? If so, when will it be in, and when can the customer expect to receive it? Giving customers information gives them a sense of control.

Shep Hyken Empty Shelves Cartoon

What if you’re out of the item and won’t get any more back in inventory? This is an opportunity to shine. If you can’t suggest a reasonable alternative, does a competitor have what the customer wants? Yes, I’m suggesting sending the customer to a competitor. Even if the sale goes to a competitor, the customer will realize you’re more interested in getting them what they want and need versus making a sale, which can go a long way in building trust that takes the relationship to a higher level.

One of my favorite examples comes from an Ace Hardware store. It was a very cold winter, and a customer was upset to find out the store was out of space heaters. Rather than say, “Sorry,” and send the customer away, the associate called a competitor, confirmed they had a space heater, and asked them to hold it for his customer. And who do you think the customer loved after that experience? (It’s a rhetorical question, but just in case you can’t figure it out … Ace Hardware!)

Any time a customer is unhappy or has a complaint, it’s an opportunity to resolve the problem and turn a Moment of Misery™ into a Moment of Magic®. For inventory issues, it’s an easy fix. Always think to yourself, even if you have to give up the sale to a competitor, “Is what I’m doing right now going to get the customer to come back?” When you have the customer’s best interest in mind, they will!

Image Credits: Unsplash, Shep Hyken

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Strategizing Execution

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Take a Tip from the Oil Industry

Strategizing Execution

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

When it comes to executing any market development playbook, the work should be organized around the same checklist of factors that structured our earlier blog on marketing strategy. Here is the overall framework to keep in mind:

The first four focus on constructing the ROI engine, the second four, on activating it. Or, to use the parlance of the oil industry, the first four represent the upstream work that locates and extracts the trapped value of an oil reservoir. This is the work of product management. The second four represent the downstream work of refining, distributing, and monetizing the end product. This is the work of product marketing. Both functions should report to a product line manager to ensure that end-to-end coordination is maintained throughout.

When a category is working its way through the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, the roles of the product manager and the product marketing manager change dramatically at each stage. In the early market, neither function has yet been staffed, as it is simply too early to organize for scaled deployment, but for the following three phases of the bowling alley, the tornado, and Main Street, these two functions lead the charge.

For the upstream product manager, here’s how the market development playbook evolves:

In the bowling alley, as we discussed at length in the earlier post on market power, the trapped value is due to a broken mission-critical process that needs substantial re-engineering only made possible by next-generation technology. The product manager needs to become an expert in this use case, and their role calls for them to both guide the product development roadmap and orchestrate the ecosystem to ensure the right partners show up at the right time.

In the tornado, trapped value has migrated from specific use cases to a whole host of potential applications. As a result, demand is widespread, infrastructure owners have budget for the new category and plan to spend it this year, and the goal is to win as much market share as one can. Product roadmaps are driven by feature competitions with others in category, and time to market with the next hot feature is the top concern. Partner recruitment now shifts to the sales side of the house where the goal is to win more market share by expanding distribution coverage beyond the limits of the direct sales force. The product manager supports this effort by driving a “partner-ready” track in the product development roadmap.

On Main Street, the “trapped value” is less like an oil reservoir and more like shale oil—it’s still there, but it is highly diffuse, collecting in small local pockets. Here the end user is in the best position to advocate for the improvements that would help most. Budgets are limited, however, so improvements need to be add-ons that are discretionary, ideally available through a digital-direct transaction.

Turning now to the downstream side of the market development checklist, here’s how the product marketing manager’s playbook evolves:

In the bowling alley, sales plays are consultative, organized around a diagnostic/prescriptive approach which the product marketing manager must continually update as more and more is learned about the problem process and how to fix it. The sales channel is direct, and the pricing is value-based, calibrated by the cost impact of not fixing the problem process. The offer competes with the status quo and the incumbent vendor who will push back with the best “good enough” response it can muster. The positioning has to make clear why that does not fill the bill and how the disruptive offer will take the problem off the table once and for all.

Inside the tornado, sales plays are competitive, organized around battle cards that are competitor-specific, which the product marketing manager must continually update to reflect the latest releases from the competition. Pricing is organized around company status in the market pecking order. Where there is proprietary technology involved, the gorilla sets the premium price for the category overall, chimps can set local pricing in their market segments if they are sufficiently differentiated to keep the gorilla out, and monkeys license or clone the gorilla technology and then compete on lowest price. Where there is no proprietary technology to create a barrier to entry, the same pecking order emerges, but it is much more fluid, meaning that it is much easier for a prince to depose a king than it is for a chimp to displace a gorilla. In all cases, competitions tend to get resolved via product versus product comparisons on features and benefits.

On Main Street, sales plays are transactional, ideally delivered through a digital self-service channel. Here the product marketing manager normally cannot rely on sending prospects to the corporate website—it is typically way too noisy a channel for this body of work—but instead either spin up a separate portal or work with a third-party digital distributor. Pricing and packaging matters a ton in any transactional business model, so the product marketing manager is responsible for frequent A/B testing or comparable experimentation on an ongoing basis. The competition is rarely direct—you are the incumbent vendor at this stage—but you must keep an eye out for the next-generation disruptor who sees your profit pool as a sitting duck. The more you can bolster your core offer with add-ons, the higher the switching costs for your end users, the less likely the challenger can penetrate your market.

Wrapping up

This concludes the sixth and final post in the Hierarchy of Powers series. Here are the links to the other five:

Framing Strategy

Strategizing Category Power: Portfolio Management

Strategizing Company Power: It’s a Team Sport

Strategizing Market Power: Target Market Initiatives

Strategizing Offer Power: The Importance of Overcommitting

I encourage you to print them out and staple them together as a reference guide to keep handy as you take on your next market development challenge.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Unsplash, Geoffrey Moore

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The Killer Strategic Concept You’ve Never Heard Of

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You Really Need to Know About Schwerpunkt!

The Killer Strategic Concept You've Never Heard Of

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, his first mission was not to create but destroy. He axed a number of failing products and initiatives, such as the ill-fated Newton personal digital assistant and the Macintosh clones. Under Jobs, Apple would no longer try to be all things to all people.

What came after was not a flurry of activity, but a limited number of highly targeted moves. First came the candy-colored iMac. It was a modest success. Then came the iPod, iPhone and iPad, breakout hits which propelled Apple from a failing company to the most valuable company on earth. Each move shifted the firm’s center of gravity to a decisive point and broke through.

That, in essence, is the principle of Schwerpunkt, a German military term that roughly translates to “focal point.” Jobs understood that he didn’t have to win everywhere, just where it mattered and focused Apple’s resources on just a few meaningful products. The truth is that good strategy relies less on charts and analysis than on finding your Schwerpunkt.

Putting Relative Strength Against Relative Weakness

The iPod, Apple’s first major hit after Jobs’ return, didn’t do anything to undermine the dominance of Microsoft and the PC, but rather focused Apple’s energy on a nascent, but fragmented industry that made products that, as Jobs put it, “sucked.” At this early stage, Apple probably couldn’t have taken on the computer giants, but it mopped up these guys.

Yet the move into music players wasn’t just about picking on scrawny weaklings, it leveraged some of Apple’s unique strengths, especially its ability to design simple, easy-to-use interfaces. Jobs’ own charisma and stature, not to mention the understanding of intellectual property rights he gained from his Pixar business, made him almost uniquely placed to navigate the challenges of setting up iTunes store, which at the time was a quagmire.

In Good Strategy | Bad Strategy management scholar Richard Rumelt makes the point that good strategy puts relative strength to bear against relative weakness and that is a key part of Schwerpunkt. In order to find your focal point, you need to get a sense of where your strengths lie and where are the best opportunities to leverage those strengths.

That’s exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple over and over again. Entering the music player business would not have worked for Microsoft or Dell, who both dominated the computer industry at the time. In fact, after the launch of the iPod both tried to create competitors and failed. The iPod was Apple’s Schwerpunkt, nobody else’s.

Identifying The Focal Point

In a military conflict, leaders determine where to concentrate their efforts by weighing a variety of factors, including commander’s intent, or the desired end state, the situation on the ground gleaned through intelligence, the terrain and the enemy’s disposition on that terrain. Officers spend their whole careers learning how to make wise decisions about schwerpunkt.

Business leaders need to weigh similar factors, including the internal capabilities of their organization such as talent, technology and information, the market context, the competitive landscape as well as what they can access through external partner ecosystems. By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he had become a master at evaluating the forces at play.

With respect to the iPod, he felt confident in Apple’s ability to combine technology with design and that the market for digital music players, as he liked to put it, sucked. By looking at what competitors had to offer, he was confident that if he could create a device that would “put 1000 songs in my pocket,” he would have a hit product.

The only problem was that the technology to create such a product didn’t exist yet. That’s where the external ecosystem came in. On a routine trip to Japan to meet with suppliers, an engineer at Toshiba mentioned that the company developed a tiny memory drive that was about the size of a silver dollar, but didn’t know what it could be used for.

Jobs immediately recognized that the memory drive was his Schwerpunkt. He produced a $10 million check on the spot and got exclusive rights to the technology. Not only would he be able to create his iPod with the “1000 songs in my pocket” he so coveted, for a time at least, none of his competitors would be able to duplicate its capability.

Getting Inside The OODA Loop

When he was still a pilot, the legendary military strategist John Boyd developed the OODA loop to improve his own decision making in the cockpit. The idea is that you first OBSERVE, your surroundings, then you ORIENT that information in terms of previous knowledge and experiences. That leads you to DECIDE and ACT, which will change the situation in some way, that you will need to observe, orient, decide and act upon.

We can see how Steve Jobs employed the OODA loop in making the decision to immediately produce a $10 million dollar check for a technology that Toshiba had no idea what to do with. He took the new information he observed and immediately oriented it with previous observations he made about the market for digital music devices.

Yet what happened next was even more interesting. When the iPod came out, it was an immediate hit, which changed the basis of competition. Other computer companies, which were competing in the realm of laptops, desktops and servers, suddenly faced a very different market and moved to create their own digital music players. Dell’s Digital Jukebox launched in 2004, Microsoft’s Zune came out in 2006. Both failed miserably.

By then Apple was already preparing the launch of the iPhone, which would change the game again, causing its competitors to Observe, Orient, Decide in Act in reaction to what Apple was doing. Boyd called this “getting inside your opponent’s OODA Loop.” By continually having to orient and react to Apple, they weren’t able to gain the initiative.

Today, it’s hard to remember just how powerful firms like Microsoft and Dell were back then, but they were absolute giants. Nevertheless, by employing the concept of Schwerpunkt, Apple went from near bankruptcy to dominating its rivals in less than a decade.

A Journey Rather Than A Destination

The biggest strategic mistake you can make is to try and win everywhere at once. To win, you need to prevail in the decisive battles, not the irrelevant skirmishes. That, in essence, is the principle of Schwerpunkt—to identify a focal point where you can direct your resources and efforts.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, computer companies were duking it out in the PC market, yet he identified digital music players as his Schwerpunkt and the iPod made Apple a serious player. As his competitors were still reacting, he launched the iPhone and on it went. Whenever Steve Jobs would, towards the end of a product presentation say, “and just one more thing,” You could guarantee that he had identified a new Schwerpunkt.

Notice how Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static, concept. It was Jobs’ ability to constantly innovate Apple’s approach, by constantly observing, reorienting and shifting the competitive context. In each case, his strategy was uniquely suited to Apple’s, capabilities, customers and ecosystem. Competitors Microsoft or Dell, more suited to the enterprise market, couldn’t be successful with a similar approach.

There is no ideal strategy, just ones that are ideally suited to a particular context, when relative strength can be brought to bear against relative weakness. Discovering the center of gravity at which you can break through is more of a journey than a destination, you can never be sure beforehand where exactly you will find it, but it will become clear once you’ve arrived.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

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Why Aren’t You?

Fearless Fashionistas Are Staying Ahead of Change

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As a fashion and lifestyle conceptualist and analyst for a major Australian department store group during the pre-Internet era, I co-created, with the GM of Marketing and GM of Women’s, Men’s, Children’s Apparel and Accessories, a completely new role. I took on the responsibility of forecasting and predicting customer, lifestyle, and fashion trends two to three years ahead of the present. While forecasting involves estimating future events or trends based on historical and statistical data, making predictions involves forming educated guesses or projections that do not necessarily rely on such data. Both forecasting and predictive skills are vital for developing strategic foresight—an organized and systematic approach to exploring plausible futures and anticipating, better preparing for, and staying ahead of change.

In this exciting new role, I had to ensure that my forecasts and predictions did not cause people to become anxious and tense, leading to poor or conflicting decisions involving millions of dollars. Instead, I needed to make sure that my forecasts convinced people that the well-researched information had been collected, captured, analyzed, and synthesized effectively. To ensure that the discovery of new marketing concepts is prompted by the development of strategic foresight, which enables people to make informed, million-dollar investment decisions by staying ahead of change.

This was before the revolutions in Design Thinking and Strategic Foresight. It taught me the fundamentals of agile and adaptive thinking processes, as well as the importance of creating and capturing value by viewing it from the customer’s perspective. It was initiated through rigorous research that involved framing the domain and scanning for trends by mentally moving back and forth among many scenarios, making links, connections, and unlikely associations. The information could then be actualized, analyzed, and synthesized to focus on evaluating a range of plausible futures as forecast scenarios. To envision the future by identifying the most promising or commercially viable trends in Australian marketing and merchandising, thereby supporting better policy-making across the organization, which consisted of forty-two department stores.

At the time, Australian fashion and lifestyle trends were considered six months behind those in Europe and the USA. This allowed me to utilize current and historical sales data, along with statistical methods, to create a solid foundation for the sales and marketing situation across various merchandise segments. Having completed a marketing degree as an adult learner, I applied and integrated marketing concepts and principles from product and fashion lifecycle management. Through being inventive, I built a fashion and lifestyle information system that had not previously existed, enabling the whole organization to stay ahead of change.  

I conducted backcasting research and built relationships with top Australian manufacturers that supplied our customers, gathering evidence and feedback that supported or challenged my approach to developing trend-tracking processes over a three-year period. I traveled widely four times a year to Europe and the USA to research the fashion and lifestyle value chain, visiting yarn, textile, couture, and ready-to-wear shows to explore, discover, identify, and validate emerging and diverging trends, providing context and evidence of their evolution and convergence. This was further tested and validated by analyzing and synthesizing the most critical and commercially successful fashion and lifestyle ranges marketed and merchandised at that time in major global department stores and leading retail outlets.

Formal research was also carried out through various channels, including desktop research, fashion and lifestyle forecasting services, as well as USA and European media, to gather customer insights that could then be identified, analyzed, synthesized, and developed and implemented into key fashion marketing and merchandising trends across the entire group of forty-two department stores. This enabled them to present a coordinated marketing and merchandising approach across all apparel to customers and stay ahead of change.

This was my journey into what is now known as strategic foresight, laying the vital foundations for developing my brain’s neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity, and becoming an agility shifter, with a prospective mind and adaptive thinking strategy that enables me to stay ahead of change.

Staying ahead of change

It took me many years to realize that I was chosen for this enviable role, not because of my deep knowledge and extensive experience, but for my intuitive and unconventional way of thinking. In Tomorrowmind, Dr Martin Seligman calls this ‘prospection’, an ability to metabolize the past with the present to envisage the future. He states that a prospective mind extracts the nutrients from the past and the present, then excretes the toxins and ballast to prepare for tomorrow. He defines prospection as “the mental process of projecting and evaluating future possibilities and then using these projections to guide thought and action.”

This develops the ability to stay ahead of change by anticipating and adapting to it, and includes many elements, such as:

  • Being able to adopt both a systemic and tactical approach, as well as a structured and detailed perspective alongside an agile and flexible view of the current reality or present state, simultaneously.
  • Sensing, connecting, perceiving, and linking operational patterns, and analyzing and synthesizing them within their context.
  • Generating, exploring, and unifying possibilities and options for selecting the most valuable commercial applications that match customers’ lifestyle needs and wants.
  • Unlearning and viewing the world with fresh eyes through sensing and perceiving it through a paradoxical lens, and cultivating a ‘both/and’ bird’s-eye perspective.
  • Opening your heart, mind, and will to relearning and learning, letting go of what may have worked in the past, focusing your emotional energy, towards learning new mindsets and mental models and relearning how to perceive the world differently.
  • Wondering and wandering into fresh and multiple perspectives underlie the development of a strategic foresight capability.

This approach helps shift your focus across the polarities of thought, from a fixed, binary, or linear and competitive approach to one that is neuro-scientifically grounded. It aims to foster your neuroplasticity and neuroelasticity within your brain, enabling the development of new and diverse perspectives that support prospective, strategic, critical, conceptual, complementary, and creative thinking processes necessary for staying ahead of change.

  • Improves strategic thinking

Strategic foresight aims to anticipate, analyze, synthesize, adapt to, and shape the factors relevant to a person, team, or company’s business, enabling it to perform and grow better than its competitors and stay ahead of change. It requires confidence, capacity, and competence to partner effectively and to think and act differently, using cutting-edge analytics, proven creative tools, and artificial intelligence (AI). This approach empowers, enables, and equips individuals with better, more risk-informed strategic thinking. It also provides a foundation for creative thinking by helping people better understand the options and alternatives available to them. Additionally, it identifies potential developments that could lead to building a competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level, enabling them to stay ahead of change, innovate, and succeed in an uncertain business environment.  

  • Increases adaptability

In a recent article, ‘Navigating the Future with Strategic Foresight, the Boston Consulting Group stated:

“It’s not about gathering more data than everyone else but about being able to detect forward-looking signals, stretch perspectives, and interpret the data with fresh eyes. Uncertainty does not dissipate; rather, strategic foresight offers the clarity of direction that comes from greater confidence in data, assumptions, and analysis”.

The information gathered through strategic foresight enhances people’s ability and willingness to adapt their responses to uncertainty and unexpected situations and embrace change. It provides concrete evidence, in the form of data, assumptions, and analysis, to support people in being adaptive. This requires being open to unlearning, relearning, and learning, protecting you against anxiety, stress, and burnout, and helping you stay ahead of change and become resilient to create, invent, and innovate through chaos, uncertainty and disruption.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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Strategizing Market Power

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Target Market Initiatives

Strategizing Market Power - Target Market Initiatives

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Market power derives from addressing an urgent mission-critical use case in a particular vertical industry requiring a specialized solution that the incumbent vendors either cannot or will not provide. Power aggregates around a single vendor who is the first to provide an end-to-end solution (what Ted Levitt taught us to call the whole product), typically with the support of partners whom the vendor has recruited to the task. Once success has been verified, prospective customers rally around the new solution, making it the de facto standard for that market segment, effectively excluding all other competition. This dramatically lowers the cost of acquisition and maximizes the lifetime value of the addressable market.

The mechanism for obtaining market power is called a target market initiative. It begins with the selection of a target market segment. Here the criteria for selection are three:

  1. Big enough to matter. The goal is to win well over 50% of the total segment within a three-year horizon, with the resulting revenue providing a material portion of the organization’s total revenue, and an even more meaningful portion of its profit contribution.
  2. Small enough to lead. Again, if your organization is going to win over 50% of the segment within a three-year period, the segment must be small enough to make this feasible given your current size and funding.
  3. Good fit with your crown jewels. To address an intractable problem requires breakthrough capability that others do not have, or what we like to call your “crown jewels.” These accelerate your path to success and provide a barrier to entry to protect your market segment leadership position once it is attained.

The playbook for running a target market initiative is described at length in Crossing the Chasm. It is organized around the following set of factors:

  • Target Customer. The bullseye target is the business process owner for the broken mission-critical process. They will provide the subject matter expertise. A secondary target is their executive sponsor. They will create budget to fund the effort.
  • Compelling Reason to Buy. The use case has to be both mission-critical and urgent, in order to overcome a pragmatist’s normal inertial resistance to embracing anything categorically new. Here pain, not gain, is the source of the trapped value that moves the customer to lean in and collaborate, and all your sales and marketing should be focused on the relevant pain points and their remedies.
  • Whole Product. This is the bill of materials for the complete solution, everything the customer needs to take the problem off the table, with nothing extra added. It is designed backward from the customer’s problem, not forward from your supply chain or your financial goals and objectives.
  • Partners and Allies. Whatever is on the whole product’s bill of materials that is not provided by your company must come from a partner. One of the functions of a target market initiative is to orchestrate the coming together of such partners to ensure timely delivery of the whole product. The focus is on completing the solution, not adding sales coverage.
  • Distribution. Target market initiatives require a direct sales channel to execute a consultative sales process, organized around a diagnostic/prescriptive approach, supported by marketing that speaks directly to the business process owner and their executive sponsor. This must not be outsourced, as it is through these direct interactions that you establish your company as the market segment leader.
  • Pricing. Pricing is value-based, calibrated by the consequences of the current as-yet-to-be-fixed broken mission-critical business process. Discounting is never appropriate as the customer is far more concerned about addressing their urgent needs than saving on the purchase price.
  • Competition. There are two classes of competitors in play. The first is the incumbent vendor who is not solving the problem satisfactorily at present but who could throw people at it in an attempt to get to “good enough.” The other is a vendor with breakthrough capabilities similar to yours who has not made the commitment to deliver the whole product but who has a partner that might try to do so.
  • Positioning. You are the breakthrough vendor who has made the whole product commitment, meaning you have demonstrated a deep understanding of the customer’s industry and its problem process, and you have developed a repeatable solution that will get better as each new instantiation leads to more useful features and a more engaged ecosystem of partners.
  • Next Target Customer. For start-ups, this will normally be an adjacent segment, either a new use case from the same customer base or the same use case from a different segment. For established enterprises whose size dictates that target market segments can never be material to total revenues, winning a target market segment creates a hook for M&A as well as makes you a lot more knowledgeable about which companies are worth acquiring.

Target market initiatives are the most reliable play in the B2B innovation playbook, as witnessed by the staying power of Crossing the Chasm, currently in its fourth decade of being in print, pushing two million copies in total sales worldwide. In closing, then, let me leave you with eight great reasons for building one into your next annual plan:

  1. Gain market adoption for a disruptive technology. This is the classic chasm-crossing play.
  2. Penetrate a new geography. Establish your reputation as a worthy vendor.
  3. Get out from behind the market leader. Gorillas can never defend themselves against highly focused chimps. All they can do is try to isolate you from making any further progress.
  4. Anchor a turnaround. When your enterprise has been on a losing streak, it is critical to “win one for the Gipper.” Target market initiatives are your best bet.
  5. Solve for the “stuck in neutral” problem. When the macro economy is in the doldrums, and customers are slow to buy anything, a truly problematic use case overcomes their hesitancy.
  6. Capitalize on a great niche opportunity. There are use cases where the size of the market is small, but the trapped value is enormous, and you can build a major franchise without ever leaving the segment, as has happened in CAD, Wall Street, health care, and aerospace.
  7. Exploit the “granularity of growth.” In mature markets where average growth rates are in the low single digits, there are always pockets of double-digit growth around problematic use cases. You just need to target them directly.
  8. Capitalize on a market in transition. As markets are working through long-lead transitions, short-term progress can be made locally rather than globally. The evolution of the hybrid workplace would be a current example.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure.  Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used.  You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success.  You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them.  But you are smarter than that.  You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans.  Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

  1. Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
  2. What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
  3. How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

  1. Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
  2. Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
  3. Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true.  They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

  1. How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
  2. How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
  3. How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success.  But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Convinced that Strategic Foresight shows you a path through uncertainty?  Great!  Just don’t rush off, hire futurists, run some workshops, and start churning out glossy reports.

Activity is not achievement.

Learning from those who have achieved, however, is an excellent first activity.  Following are the stories of two very different companies from different industries and eras that pursued Strategic Foresight differently yet succeeded because they tied foresight to the P&L.

Shell: From Laggard to Leader, One Decision at a Time

It’s hard to imagine Shell wasn’t always dominant, but back in the 1960s, it struggled to compete.  Tired of being blindsided by competitors and external events, they sought an edge.

It took multiple attempts and more than 10 years to find it.

In 1959, Shell set up their Group Planning department, but its reliance on simple extrapolations of past trends to predict the future only perpetuated the status quo.

In 1965, Shell introduced the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool to predict cash flow based on current results and forecasted changes in oil consumption.  But this approach was abandoned because executives feared “that it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

Then, in 1967, in a small 18th-floor office in London, a new approach to ongoing planning began.  Unlike past attempts, the goal was not to predict the future.  It was to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future.”

Within a few years, their success was obvious.  Shell executives stopped treating scenarios as interesting intellectual exercises and started using them to stress-test actual capital allocation decisions.

This doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly embraced or even believed the scenarios. In fact, when scenarios suggested that oil prices could spike dramatically, most executives thought it was far-fetched. Yet Shell leadership used those scenarios to restructure their entire portfolio around different types of oil and to develop new capabilities.

The result? When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil prices quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel, Shell was the only major oil company ready. While competitors scrambled and lost billions, Shell turned the crisis into “big profits.”

Disney: From Missed Growth Goals to Unprecedented Growth

In 2012, Walt Disney International’s (WDI) aggressive growth targets collided with a challenging global labor market, and traditional HR approaches weren’t cutting it.

Andy Bird, Chairman of Walt Disney International, emphasized the criticality of the situation when he said, “The actions we make today are going to make an impact 10 to 20 years down the road.”

So, faced with an unprecedented challenge, the team pursued an unprecedented solution: they built a Strategic Foresight capability.

WDI trained over 500 leaders across 45 countries, representing five percent of its workforce, in Strategic Foresight.  More importantly, Disney integrated strategic foresight directly into their strategic planning and performance management processes, ensuring insights drove business decisions rather than gathering dust in reports.

For example, foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing (remember, this was 2012) and that consumers wanted more control over when and how they consumed content.  This insight directly shaped Disney+’s development.

The results speak volumes. While traditional media companies struggled with streaming disruption, Disney+ reached 100 million subscribers in just 16 months.

Two Paths.  One Result.

Shell and Disney integrated Strategic Foresight differently – the former as a tool to make high-stakes individual decisions, the latter as an organizational capability to affect daily decisions and culture.

What they have in common is that they made tomorrow’s possibilities accountable to today’s decisions. They did this not by treating strategic foresight as prediction, but as preparation for competitive advantage.

Ready to turn these insights into action? Next week, we’ll dive into the tools in the Strategic Foresight toolbox and how you and your team can use them to develop strategic foresight that drives informed decisions.

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Company power is primarily a function of the amount of ecosystem support for your offerings, which in turn is due largely to the market-making opportunities you create for partners to resell or flesh out your whole product. Market share leaders enjoy the most extensive ecosystem support because their installed base creates the majority of partner opportunities.

Let me note, however, that in the context of our Hierarchy of Powers framework, market share is a misnomer. The correct phrase would be category share. That’s because in our taxonomy markets are defined by groups of customers whereas categories are defined by groups of competitors. When financial analysts talk about market share, they are referring to category share, and it is your share of the category that sets the upper bounds of the opportunities you can create for ecosystem partners, the percentage of the total category you can make available to the ecosystem.

After category share, the next most important determinants of company power are barriers to entry and barriers to exit, or what we often just call “stickiness.” Because sticky offerings create ongoing opportunities for up-sell and cross-sell, as well as resist being displaced by lower-cost competitors, they enable vendors to sustain above-commodity pricing margins for the life of the category.

Gorilla Royalty Game

The strongest form of stickiness comes from proprietary technology that is category-enabling, the kind that Oracle has had in databases, Qualcomm in smartphones, Microsoft in operating systems, and Intel in microprocessors. When a category consolidates around such companies, it creates a hierarchy of company power we call a Gorilla Game, entailing three roles — gorilla, chimp, and monkey. In the absence of proprietary technology, categories form an analogous hierarchy with much lower switching costs, something we call a royalty game, organized around a parallel set of roles — king, prince, and serf. Cellular telephony, Wintel PCs, WiFi networking, and DRAM memory chips all exemplify categories with this latter type of structure.

The difference in stickiness between these two hierarchies creates dramatic differences in market capitalization. In the gorilla game, the gorilla dominates the category for the entirety of its life cycle, and thus its market cap gets a very high premium indeed. Chimps also have proprietary technology, hence stickiness, but are not the market standard, hence more limited scope. Their best play is to develop an independent ecosystem organized around high-value use cases specific to particular vertical markets, the way the Unix workstation vendors competed successfully against PCs with CAD-like applications for cinema, semiconductor, oil exploration, fluid dynamics, and high-frequency trading. And finally, there is a very large market open to being served by monkeys who are able to clone the gorilla technology and deliver a plug-compatible alternative at a much lower price.

When it comes to royalty games, the absence of proprietary technology with high switching costs leads to a much more fluid hierarchy of power. The category leader is still the king, but it can be deposed by some up-and-coming prince, the way that Compaq displaced the IBM PC, the way that Micron can challenge Samsung in DRAMs, the way that Aruba can challenge Cisco in Wi-Fi. Here the low-cost providers, whom we termed the serfs, have an easier time gaining entry into a large and growing market, but a harder time sustaining even the most modest of margins, as there is always some hungrier low-cost competitor looking over their shoulder.

Overall, the key takeaway is that, while the gorillas and gorilla games get the bulk of the attention, especially from the investment community, all six of these strategies are perfectly viable provided you play within the parameters of your role. The key is not to hallucinate about what role that is.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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