What to Do Against Disruptive Business Models?

Constantinos Markides e Daniel Oyon, no número de Verão deste ano da MIT Sloan Management Review apresentam um artigo muito interessante sobre trabalhar para diferentes clientes-alvo "What to Do Against Disruptive Business Models? (When and How to Play Two Games at Once)"

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O problema:

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"most companies are unsuccessful in their efforts to compete with two business models at once"

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"By attempting to compete with themselves, Porter argued, companies risk paying a significant straddling cost: damaging their existing brands and diluting their organizations’ cultures for innovation and differentiation.
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His view was that a company could find itself “stuck in the middle” if it tried to compete with both low-cost and differentiation strategies."

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A solução:

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"The primary solution proposed to solve this problem is to keep the two business models (and their underlying value chains) separate in two distinct organizations. That is the “innovator’s solution” that Clayton Christensen proposed and that has been supported by others"

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"Although the idea of creating separate business units has received a lot of attention, this approach by itself does not ensure success."

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"We have also found that competing successfully with two different and conflicting business models involves more than creating a separate unit. Several years ago, we studied the experiences of 68 companies that faced the challenge of competing with dual business models. Our main finding was that only a handful of companies that created separate units were successful in playing two games. Many had created separate units and still failed, suggesting that separation in itself was not enough to ensure success."

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Mas não basta criar uma outra unidade...

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"we examined 42 companies that had created a separate unit to compete in the new market. Of these, 10 were successful, while 32 failed. We compared the two groups on three dimensions:

• (1) the amount of strategic, financial and operational autonomy given to the unit (measured on a scale of 1 to 5, with high scores implying that decision-making autonomy was granted to the unit)
• (2) differences in the culture, budgetary and investment policies, evaluation systems and rewards relative to the parent (measured on a scale of 1 to 6 with high scores implying that these policies were very different)
• (3) whether the new unit was managed by a new CEO and (4) whether the new CEO came from outside the company or was transferred internally.

We found that successful companies gave much more operational and financial autonomy to the separate units than unsuccessful companies. They also allowed the units to develop their own cultures and budgetary systems, and to have their own CEOs. These are all policies consistent with the notion that the new units need freedom to operate as they see fit. However, we also found that autonomy did not come at the expense of synergies: The parent still kept close watch over the strategy of the unit; cooperation between the unit and the parent was encouraged through common incentive and reward systems; and the CEO tended to be transferred from inside the organization to facilitate closer cooperation and active exploitation of synergies."