Active disengagement and growth strategy

Professor Rita McGrath is widely recognized as a global authority on leading innovation and growth during uncertain times. The webinar organized by WOBI a few weeks ago allowed me to give you the gist of what she shared and I hope you will find her ideas useful for your business organizations.

For many business leaders, 2020 proved to be a challenging year for their organizations. For others, it was a time to reset and develop a new strategy for growth and innovation. As you lead an organization, inflection initially does not look like a threat; however, Rita suggests that is not the case. Organizations must continue to innovate and try to improve upon the services and products they provide further.

Businesses need to shift from a sustainable competitive advantage to a transient competitive advantage, which as a portfolio, can keep companies in the lead much longer than before. Gone are the days when businesses can rely on their product’s unique selling proposition as their competitive advantage that can sustain their business success for many years. To put this plainly, your successful product or services may have a very short shelf-life.

“Successful businesses can be alluring,” Rita says. It’s easy to be lured by success into thinking that you don’t have to keep renewing your growth premises. In today’s rapidly changing environments, companies need to be thinking about building ways to gain a competitive advantage to replace those that have faded away. Rita proposes a new strategy playbook to deal with this situation:

1. Agility: Continuous change. Getting rid of stability assumptions and assuming constant change.

2. Disengagement: Getting out of old strategies without it being overly difficult.

3. Resources: Placing your best people and best resources in areas of growth opportunity.

4. Innovation: Built as proficiency for growth: Ideation, incubation, allocation.

5. Leadership: Making decisions through a discovery-driven approach.

6. Career: Keep opportunities open and fluid within organizations.

They may be simple, but there are barriers within organizations and these lie within the incubation and acceleration process. To limit these barriers, Rita explains how to allocate resources across an activity portfolio:

1. Core: Expanding, improving, innovating, and enhancing the core of the organization.

2. Platform positioning: Putting sufficient resources behind planned initiatives.

3. Platform scouting: Transitioning from early adopting to mass-market customers.

4. Positioning options: Knowing demand and learning how to implement solutions to meet demands properly.

5. Scouting option: Testing and experimenting with hypotheses and gathering information.

6. Stepping stones: Experimenting with information gathered from hypothesis testing. Competing in arenas - your customers should not be a mystery.

Rita suggests that organizations think about their customers in an enlightened way. They need to focus on the needs of their customers by considering the following:

1. Behavioral segmentation: Focus on jobs to be done for your customers and organization.

2. Consumption chain: Understand the needs and wants of your customers through their journey.

3. Category response: Making the appropriate decision by aligning your customers’ needs with your organization.

Organizations should think about what negatives they can get rid of to enhance the customer journey and learn to grasp the whole chain. Organizations should reconfigure their products and services’ attributes to create meaningful differentiation from a customers’ point of view.

Let me share some other key takeaways from Rita’s presentation at WOBI. Change is the normal thing, not the unusual thing. Innovation is a proficiency; it is not this weird thing that happens once every 15 years. Healthy disengagement may be required to ensure that we are not engaging in a horrible political process wherein you are putting your best resources against your best opportunities.

There is just so much to learn from these great experts and practitioners being featured in WOBI. The one next in line will be Dr. Adam Grant as he presents a leadership master class. I will attend this one for sure. I cannot help but notice that the more I learn, the more excited I am, and the more hopeful it is for me as I handle the businesses under my care.

The dean of modern-day management, Peter Drucker, says: “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” This statement is so true, and this is why I would attend every session they offer and then do my best to share the ideas with you in this column or space.

(Francis Kong’s highly acclaimed Level Up Leadership Master Class online will be held from June 22 to 24. Develop leadership skills that translate into personal, career, and business growth. For inquiries and reservations, contact April at +63928-559-1798 or and for more information, visit www.levelupleadership.ph)