Category: Strategy

Innovation, Strategy

Does Deploying Technology Lead to Competitive Advantage?

In a recent post for Gartner Blogs, Scott Nelson talks about how IT leaders obsess about not using a technology that their competitors use for a given business function. The key reason that they seem to think about is around “competitive differentiation”. As Scott rightly points out, the differentiation doesn’t necessarily come from the technology or the solution that they deploy. The competitive differentiation comes when we focus on “How” and the “Why” and not on the “What”. The reason (Why) a business might deploy the exact same technology or even product can be very different. Some might want to […]

Strategy, transformation

6 Levels of Commitment to Change

Premise: Every change or a transformation effort needs the support and commitment of people who will either be affected by the change or who lead the change or who could influence the success of the change effort. Hence, it is important for those who want to drive or lead the change effort learn how committed they are to the change. The commitment can vary from people wanting to outright sabotage the change on one extreme to co-creating or co-owning the change on the other end of the spectrum. Along the spectrum, there are 6 levels or stages of commitment that […]

Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Strategy, transformation

Four insights on Achieving Resilient Growth Consistently

The best selling authors of the book – Blue Ocean Strategy, recently sent an email in which they speak about the 4 pieces of advice they give to their customers on how to build resilient growth for their organisations. Here are the 4 pieces of advice. 1. Focus on building a healthy, balanced portfolio of market-competing and market-creating strategic moves. Both are important. While market-competing moves generate today’s cash, market-creating moves ensure tomorrow’s growth.   2. Don’t wait for growth to slow to make market-creation a strategic priority.Prepare in advance. You’ll be buffered by your market-creating move in a downturn cycle […]

Ideas, Recommendation, Strategy

Book Review – Humanocracy by Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini

Overview: Gary Hamel has been one of my favorite authors and management guru’s. In his most recent book Humanocracy, he lays out the case against bureaucracy and instead argues that we need to embrace what he calls “Humanocracy” as in build human centric organisations. He chronicles some interesting experiments being done worldwide with different management philosophies and based on them, posits some principles which when put in use can lead organisations to become a lot more human centric and can address the shackles that bureaucracy has on most organisations. What is the book about: The first third of the book […]