Business Strategy Navigation 2009
June 25, 2009
Welcome to BobJonas.com. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Let us Consider:
Our corporate strategy research has determined that firms that lack acceptable profitable growth are driven by one or more of these five issues:
1.Lack of Profitable orientation
2.Not enough focus on customers to drive the competitive advantage
3.Lack of cross-functional, cross-border, intra-hierarchical teamwork
4.Lack of sense of urgency
5.No shared vision or common strategy planning
This business strategy report expresses a solution for the strategic planner to solve these problems.
Every American third-grader is taught to chase her dreams—if not by Oprah, then (surprisingly) through the oft-dreaded academic discipline of social studies. Textbooks regale children with stories of the great explorers (Cortés, Drake, Erickson), whose adventures are celebrated with pomp and circumstance. When Columbus Day meant a class popcorn party, the explorers’ heady determination was the stuff of heroic myth. As Columbus Day became less important—coincided with the high school marketing test or, later, the marketing managers’ meeting—so did the explorers. Our new heroes are successful entrepreneurs who command wealth from mahogany desks instead of wresting it from foreign mud. Upon reflection, though, it becomes apparent that in a New Economy as vast and exhilaratingly uncertain as the (old) New World, today’s successful manager more resembles explorers half a millennium away than s/he does the CEOs of two decades ago.
Consider Ferdinand Magellan, who piloted the first global circumnavigation. Magellan’s ambition drove him to forsake his unsupportive Portuguese government, relinquish military titles, and bargain for patronage with the king of rival Spain. Having found support, Magellan set his sights on reaching the Spice Islands, a globally coveted commodity, via a circuitous and uncertain route around South America. In September of 1519, Magellan left Spain with five ships, 250 men, broad sailing experience, a general plan, and a fistful of chutzpah. While at sea, he encountered and over-came mutiny, debilitating storms, malnutrition and scurvy, the loss of ships and theft of supplies, and ambi-guous direction. In order to discover and navigate the now-famous (and globally indispensable) Strait of Magellan, the crew tried inlet after inlet without success. 38 backbreaking days after its discovery, the icy-cold Strait coughed them into the Pacific Ocean, a vast field of adventurous potential. Magellan’s navi- gational strategy was simple: goal in sight, he set off with a general master plan—and trusted his knowledge and intuition to guide him through waves of uncertainty.
The New Economy and the New World may not be physically identical—but in an age when knowledge is gold and markets depend on the windy whims of innovation, a comparison between managers and Renaissance explorers is apt. It was the explorers’ well-defined missions and plans, combined with capitalization on uncertainty, which facilitated profitable serendipity. Like Magellan, every company needs a strategic navigational tool that’s strong but flexible; that impels, inspires, and self-enforces; and that encourages creativity, adaptability, and surprise. Next week we will discuss the State of the Environment and How to Get Started.
Comments
Got something to say?
