30 Posts Found

• What is the unique value proposition of the ecosystem you want to create?
• Who has already built ecosystems to create a similar value proposition?
• Do you have the resources and capabilities to be the orchestrator of a new ecosystem and overcome the advantages of the existing ecosystems?
• If trusted partners have the complementary resources you need to create your ecosystem, should you invite them as core partners?
• If

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Authors: Andrew Shipilov, Francesco Burelli | Source: The Five Essential Roles of Corporate Ecosystems | Subject: Strategy Questions

1. Is it now, or will it likely be, a winning ecosystem?
2. How well do the purpose and culture of the ecosystem resonate with your own values and preferences?
3. Are commitments required (exclusivity, for example, or ecosystem-specific investments) that could limit your future flexibility?
4. Do you have the transparency and decision rights to understand and influence the development of the ecosystem?
5. To what extent do regulations for input,

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Authors: Balázs Zoletnik, Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun | Source: How Do You Succeed as a Business Ecosystem Contributor? | Subject: Strategy Questions

1. What’s important?
2. What should be the same?
3. What needs to change?

Author: Jason Fried | Source: Nailing the Next Five Years | Subject: Strategy Questions

Great strategies answer five critical questions (“the strategic five”) in ways that are unique to your company:

1. What business or businesses should your company be in?
2. How should you add value to your businesses?
3. Who should be the target customers for your businesses?
4. What should be your value propositions to those target customers?
5. What capabilities should differentiate your ability to add value to your businesses and deliver their

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Author: Ken Favaro | Source: Why Popular Strategies Always Fade | Subject: Strategy Questions

Companies collect and analyze a great deal of information in order to estimate their value-creation potential. But in our experience, that information doesn’t always help them answer the most important questions when it comes to creating a detailed value-creation strategy. Below are eight questions that we believe should inform every company’s strategy to create value. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you … [ Read more ]

Authors: Daniel Stelter, Eric Olsen, Frank Plaschke, Gerry Hansell, Hady Farag, Jeff Kotzen | Source: Improving the Odds: Strategies for Superior Value Creation | Subjects: Finance Questions, Management Questions, Strategy Questions

1. What does not fit? Ask yourself, of the various activities and businesses that you have moved into, do they make sense together? Individually, each of them may seem attractive, but can you explain why they would work well together; why the sum is greater than the parts?
2. What would an outsider do? Firms often suffer from legacy products, projects, or beliefs. Things they do

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Author: Freek Vermeulen | Source: 5 Strategy Questions Every Leader Should Make Time For | Subject: Strategy Questions

In Build, Borrow, or Buy, Laurence Capron and Will Mitchell a highly structured examination of the three fundamental modes — or “pathways” — for obtaining the resources needed to grow. They are: developing the needed resources internally, or “building” them; contracting or partnering to obtain resources, or “borrowing” them; and acquiring, or “buying” them. According to the authors, companies should be adept at all three. … [ Read more ]

Author: Ken Favaro | Source: Sourcing Growth | Subject: Strategy Questions

• Does it violate any strategic laws of gravity?
• Do my numbers match my strategy?
• Will it create value?
• Is it material?
• Is it differentiated?
• Is it just ‘PowerPoint engineering’? (assuming that anything people say they can do, they can do)
• Where are we in our strategic journey?
• Are we properly balancing growth and risk?
• What are the facts?
• Is the problem solvable, and do we care?
• Who can solve that problem?
• Why might we fail?
• How

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Authors: David Speiser, Gail Lumsden, Jeffrey Elton, Raymond Gilmartin | Source: How We Do It: Strategic Tests From Four Senior Executives | Subject: Strategy Questions

Value proposition

• Is your value proposition well aligned with customer needs?
• Could someone offer a better deal?
• What other jobs could you do on behalf of customers?

Customer segments

• Are you continuously acquiring new customers?
• Could the market become saturated?
• What new segments could you serve?

Channels

• Are your delivery channels efficient?
• Are your channels in danger of becoming irrelevant?
• How can you improve channel effectiveness?

Customer relationships

• Are you easily replaced by a

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Author: Matthew E. May | Source: How To Create A Disruptive Business Model | Subject: Strategy Questions

1. Customer Segments. For whom are we creating value? Who are our most important customers?
2. Value Propositions. What value do we deliver to the customer? Which one of our customer’s problems are we helping to solve? Which customer needs are we satisfying? What bundles of products and services are we offering to each Customer Segment?
3. Channels. Through which Channels do our Customer Segments want to be

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Authors: Alexander Osterwalder, Matthew E. May, Yves Pigneur | Source: The 9 Elements Of An Ironclad Business Model | Subject: Strategy Questions

If you were to design a business model from scratch, you would have to make four decisions:

1. What are the boundaries of my business, both vertically (the degree of integration along the value chain) and horizontally (the width of the portfolio of products offered and markets served)?
2. What is the nature of the relationships between my business and parties outside the boundaries of my business,

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Authors: Henri de Bodinat, Herman Vantrappen, Michael Ungerath | Source: Bringing business models down to earth | Subject: Strategy Questions

Approach

• What style of annual planning is right for our company?
• Where are we drawing external inspiration from?
• How are we tailoring it to our business model and stage?
• Is there anything we explicitly don’t want to do, because it’s not a fit or we don’t agree with it?

Vision

• How far forward are we looking?
• How are we balancing a big vision with what we can practically do in

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Source: Annual Planning Sucks — A CPO, CRO, CFO, and COO Share Advice on How to Make it Better | Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

Ecosystems and ecosystem thinking are the lens through which you should view important decisions about your value proposition, as well as about how to capture and deliver value. Below are questions you should ask. 

Value Proposition

• Will ecosystems change where we should compete?
• What unmet customer needs will be most promising?
• What new customer segments might we serve?    

Value Capture

• How can we benefit from value pool shifts?
• Which costs will drive

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Matthew Duffey, Venky Jayaraman, Veronique Roos-Emonds | Source: From stagnation to innovation: Make business model reinvention real | Subject: Strategy Questions

Reset questions are the six questions a team asks when they are resetting the strategy: 

1. What is the situation, and how will this change? 
2. What is success? 
3. Where will we play? 
4. How will we win? 
5. What will stop us? 
6. What should we do?

Author: Rebecca Homkes | Source: The Illusion Of Alignment: Why Your Strategy Execution Is Failing | Subject: Strategy Questions

Capital markets

• What has driven our historic shareholder returns over various time horizons?
• How does our valuation stack up to peers’ today, and why?
• What are the highest-impact levers to change our valuation (growth, margin improvement rates, etcetera)?

Strategy

Are we in the right businesses, geographies, sectors, product lines, and customer segments?

How can we strengthen our competitive advantage in these chosen areas?

What are our highest-potential M&A, partnership, and divestment opportunities?

Commercial

• What

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Authors: Carolyn Dewar, Kurt Strovink, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra | Source: Staying ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance | Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

The following questions, based on BCG research into the characteristics of robust, resilient business models, can help you navigate this part of the process:

• Can the business model scale effectively? Can it be replicated across all your business units or the markets you serve, without diminishing returns?
• Will the business model differentiate your brand or product and make it more competitive in the marketplace?
• Will it reduce

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Authors: David Young, Marine Gerard | Source: Four Steps to Sustainable Business Model Innovation | Subject: Strategy Questions

Way to Play

• Are we clear about how we choose to create value in the marketplace?
• Are we investing in the capabilities that really matter to our way to play?

Capabilities System

• Can we articulate the three to six capabilities that describe what we do uniquely better than anyone else?
• Have we defined how they work together in a system?
• Do our strategy documents reflect this?

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Subject: Strategy Questions

1. How are you deploying digital technology to proactively disrupt your industry?
2. How are you keeping track of the “ratchet effect” customers have when interacting with businesses, both online and offline? Do you know not only what’s best-in-class, but also what is best-in-any-class?
3. How differently do your customers experience your company online versus offline?
4. How do you assess your company’s competitive essence and how it

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Subjects: IT Questions, Management Questions, Strategy Questions

How can you tell if your company is fit for growth? Here is a simple, three-question diagnostic:

1. Do you have clear priorities, focused on strategic growth, that drive your investments?
2. Do your costs line up with those priorities? In other words, do you deploy your resources toward them efficiently and effectively?
3. Is your organization set up to enable you to achieve those priorities?

Source: Is Your Company Fit … [ Read more ]

Subjects: Management Questions, Strategy Questions

1. How willing are customers to continue to pay for further improvements in performance that historically merited attractive price premiums? One of the key tipping points in a market occurs when a company, in Christensen’s language, overshoots a given market tier by providing them performance that they can’t use. Your television remote control probably serves as a daily reminder of overshooting. Each of those buttons can

… [ Read more ]

Subject: Strategy Questions