"Changing those lenses can alter your sense of what is possible"

"A typical customer base contains thousands, even tens of thousands, of customers—businesses, consumers, and distributors. There are nearly infinite ways that you can view a complex customer base built over time. Yet it's worthwhile to take the time to figure out the patterns that best explain the underlying causes of purchase behaviors and basic needs. In some cases, this kind of study can reveal segments of great strength or great potential, now lost in the haze of commerce, on which you can build a coherent strategy.
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The lenses that you use to view the world affect everything, including how you analyze your customers. Changing those lenses can alter your sense of what is possible, the limits you face, the threats around you, and even your core. Often your perception of reality is as important in shaping your actions and your future as reality itself. When these mental maps change, the world is never again the same to you."

Trecho retirado de "Unstoppable" de Chris Zook

Acerca do que é a estratégia

Se ontem encontramos um texto sobre o que não é a estratégia, hoje encontramos um outro, interessante, sobre o que é a estratégia:
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"Differentiation is the essence of strategy, the prime source of competitive advantage. You earn money not just by performing a valuable task but by being different from your competitors in a manner that lets you serve your core customers better and more profitably.

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In studying companies that sustained a high level of performance over many years, we found that more than 80% of them had this kind of well-defined and easily understood differentiation at the center of their strategy.

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But differentiation tends to wear with age, and not just because competitors try hard to undermine or replicate it. Often the real problem is internal: The growth generated by successful differentiation begets complexity, and a complex company tends to forget what it’s good at. Products proliferate. Acquisitions take it far from its core. Frontline employees, more and more distant from the CEO’s office, lose their sense of the company’s strategic priorities. A lack of consistency kills economies of scale and retards the company’s ability to learn. Small wonder that “reinvention” and “disruption” have become leading buzzwords; companies struggling with complexity and fading differentiation come to believe they must reimagine their entire business models quickly and dramatically or else be overwhelmed by upstarts with disruptive innovations."

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"The most enduring performers, we found, built their strategy on a few vivid, robust forms of differentiation that acted as a system, reinforcing one another."
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"The power of a repeatable model lies in the way it turns the sources of differentiation into routines, behaviors, and activity systems that everyone in the organization can understand and follow so that when a company sets out on a particular growth path, it knows how to maintain the differentiation that led to its initial success."
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"Our findings show that the simplest strategies, built around the sharpest differentiations, have hidden advantages not only with customers but also internally, with the frontline employees who must mobilize faster and adapt better than competitors. When people in an organization deeply understand the sources of its differentiation, they move in the same direction quickly and effectively, learning and improving the business model as they go. And they turn in remarkable performance year after year."
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Trechos retirados de "The Great Repeatable Business Model" de Chris Zook e James Allen publicado pela HBR no número de Novembro de 2011.

"Profit from the Core" (I/II)

A propósito do conselho de Kaplan & Norton (na revista Harvard Business Review deste mês de Janeiro de 2008, no artigo “Mastering the Management System”), sobre a leitura do livro de Chris Zook e James Allen “Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence, voltei à estante, para reler os meus sublinhados, aqui ficam alguns deles:

“… narrower focus and concentration of resources on a single core business, rather than proliferation of investments in hot markets, proved the most frequent road to sustained, profitable growth.” (é sempre mais difícil encontrar sinergias entre entidades muito diversificadas)
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“It is our thesis in this book that the foundation of sustained, profitable growth is a clear definition of a company’s core business.”
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“To identify your core business, first identify the five following assets:
1. your most potentially profitable, franchise customers (quem são os clients-alvo?)
2. your most differentiated and strategic capabilities (qual é a nossa disciplina de valor?)
3. your most critical product offerings (qual é a nossa proposta de valor)
4. your most important channels (qual é a nossa prateleira? E quem manda nela?)
5. any other critical strategic assets that contribute to the assets above (such as patents, brand name, or position at a control point in a network)
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“What is the business definition where you compete?”
“What is your core business and source of potential competitive advantage?”

Comungo desta visão.
Pragmatismo!

Volume is vanity. Profit is sanity!!!

“Having a clear sense of business boundaries and of the definition of your core is a critical starting point for growth strategy.”
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“What is the true source of differentiation and capability to win against competitors…”
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“Without a clear point of view about business boundaries, it is difficult to determine competitive position (basta olhar para aqueles cinco itens acima), the relative importance of differently positioned competitors (quem são os nossos concorrentes), or the relative strategic importance of different growth opportunities. To make the right decisions, it is critical to have a clear definition of your core business, the relevant business adjacencies that surround your core, and the competitive and economic landscape.”