Improving and Updating Corporate Strategy in Growth Stage Technology Enterprises - Dave Litwiller - Jan 10 2020
1. IMPROVING AND UPDATING
CORPORATE STRATEGY
An Abridged Guide to Strategy Deliberation Frameworks for
Rapidly Growing, Scale-Up Stage Technology Enterprises
JANUARY 10, 2020
DAVE LITWILLER
2. INTRODUCTION
• A survey of the main scale-up stage strategy formulation
and reformulation frameworks that have served me well
• As an executive, in governance, and as a consultant to
dozens of growth-stage technology firms
3. INTRODUCTION
• This suite of tools isn’t meant to be exhaustive
• These cross-functional models are what have worked for
me and the teams I’ve been part of to reinvigorate, and at
times transform, strategic thinking to keep ahead of fast
evolving competitive environments to drive outsized
profitable growth at scale
• Different corporate strategy development frameworks (not
included here) are often more applicable for mature, SKU-
diverse, high risk-reward portfolio, acquisition-driven,
regional, turnaround, or in cases, declining businesses
4. INTRODUCTION
• The presented frameworks are intended to be used
inductively
• They are meant as starting points to generate situationally
appropriate strategy development methods and processes
to best match internal and external circumstances to
sharpen and evolve corporate strategy
• The best adapted approaches often hybridize two or more
of the presented frameworks to catalyze the research,
thinking, discussion and questions that drive the most
productive renewals and augmentations of competitive
strategy
5. SWOT AND ITS
VARIATIONS
• Organizes the landscape view of internal strengths and
weaknesses and external opportunities and threats to
visualize and aid dialog about strategy that integrates all
of these factors
• The basic SWOT method is to devise strategy that builds
on strengths and opportunities while sidestepping,
reducing or eliminating weaknesses and threats
7. SWOT AND ITS
VARIATIONS
• A more dynamic version of SWOT recognizes that
opportunities and threats can be both internal and
external:
Source: HBR
8. SWOT AND ITS
VARIATIONS
• Another variation is SWTrends, where O and T are
replaced by Trends
• This is used when external opportunities and threats are
better described by market and technical trends of
sufficient path dependency to have predictive value for
strategy formulation
9. INNOVATION
SPECTRUM
• Offensive
• Frequently requires “ticket of admission” to scientific,
technological, distribution and management knowledge-
building networks
• Defensive
• Often fast following, or with low-risk differentiation
• Imitative
• Partnering with more innovative firms
• Dependent
• Subordinating to an innovator
• Opportunist
• Changing product based on fashion, not technology
10. FUTURE-BACK
• Creates a work-back plan from a blueprint for a desired
future state to the current state:
• Incorporates technology, products, services, business
model, corporate and ecosystem development
• Constructs an execution plan and a range of variations
based on prospective future internal and external
developments
• Provides forward sign-posts for alterations in the plan to
guide and facilitate further adaptations
12. SCENARIO PLANNING
• Provides a way of considering multiple future scenarios,
to get away from narrower forecasting thinking
• Asks a lot of what-if questions, and follows those
prospective developments through to strategy and
execution inferences
• Unlocks a greater range of insight and adaptability to a
wider range of future developments and outcomes
• Sometimes requires Red-Blue team competition in the
planning process to break out of the momentum of recent
behavior and thought patterns
17. PORTER’S FIVE
FORCES
• Sixth Force:
• Often in high-technology a sixth force should be
considered, that of complementary technology, product
and services which are used by the same end customers
to achieve the fully enabled benefits of the combined
offerings
19. CATALOG OF PIVOTS
• Used when significant change is called for, especially in
the product or the go-to-market
1. Zoom-in: Previous feature/subsystem becomes product
2. Zoom-out: Scope of product expands
3. Customer segment: Focus on new market sector
4. Customer need: Address different unmet customer need
5. Platform: Application <-> Platform movement
6. Business Architecture: Mass market <-> Niche movement
7. Value Capture: Change to monetization/value capture
8. Engine of Growth: Advance onset of profitable growth
9. Channel: Change distribution
10. Technology: Achieve same solution by different tech’y
Source: Erie Ries, The Lean Startup
20. GETTING TO PLAN B
• For synthesizing known or knowable analogs, anti-logs
and rigorous hypotheses about leaps of faith into a
superior business plan for a company or a line of
business that already has significant momentum
• Think of Getting to Plan B as the Scale-up version of the
Osterwalder Business Model Canvas for Start-ups
29. ADJACENCY
• A structure to aid thinking about the suitability and ways
to build a strong likelihood of success establishing
additional revenue streams from a current foundation of
success
• Adjacency is qualitatively described by the proximity of
candidate new products or services to the legacy
business in terms of products, technology, operations,
markets, customers and distribution
31. SCALE-UP STRATEGY
RENEWAL SUCCESS
FACTORS
• Getting out of the current mindset momentum of history,
at least as the basis of thought experiments and scenario
thinking to drive discussion
• Setting aside shopworn anecdotes, analogies and biases
that otherwise confine the business to hewing closely to
current behaviours and limitations
• Obtaining fresh data about candidate new markets,
competitors, relevant benchmarks and new technology
development to inform the dialog about the less familiar
parts of prospective additions and changes to strategy
32. SCALE-UP STRATEGY
RENEWAL SUCCESS
FACTORS
• Being pragmatic about the execution pace, scope of
activity and entrepreneurial management depth to be able
to succeed in new endeavours that require learning
significant new institutional behaviours, as well as
unlearning some old ones
• Keeping customers at the centre of attention, and getting
out of the office to validate key assumptions,
dependencies and hypotheses with a significant number
of prospective customers from KTMs contemplated in the
new elements of the strategy as soon as a working draft is
done
33. SCALE-UP STRATEGY
RENEWAL SUCCESS
FACTORS
• Conducting the process for strategy reformulation in a
transparent way to keep founders, leadership, the board of
directors and senior staff functions engaged and
appropriately involved
34. FOLLOW-UP
To further discuss improving and updating strategy in rapidly
scaling technology businesses:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca
Next up:
• Strategy execution and increasing organizational velocity,
quality and performance delivering strategic impact and
financial return at scale
