If you’ve spent time developing your organization’s strategy, chances are you’re familiar with your competition. You know your competitors’ offerings, their strengths and weaknesses, and how you can deliver where they don’t. But when it comes to preparing for the future, there is one alternative competitor, less obvious but omnipresent, that may not have crossed […]
Have You Addressed Your Hidden Competitor? Read More »
Is it fair that teachers earn less than bankers or that nurses earn less than CEOs? The value you get to take home may have no correlation with the value you create in the world. What if you could capture what you really deserve? What if you could turn your unique capabilities, assets, and passion
Five Steps to Capture the Value You Deserve Read More »
2020 has demanded that companies pivot like no other time in recent history. Organizations with the flexibility to adapt their business models to changing customer preferences find themselves better equipped to face current challenges and to move past them in a post-Covid world. One example of a company that has encountered this year’s inflection point
Going Public in a Pandemic: Airbnb & Inflection Points Read More »
The Ultimate Strategy Is “be good” a part of your 2021 strategy? If not, you should reconsider. When I was in business school, we learned that companies exist to do one thing: maximize shareholder value. At Outthinker, we’ve been talking for years about how this belief has become defunct. Companies are realizing that focusing solely
The Pope, Big Business, and the Future of ESG Read More »
Tony Hsieh’s Strategic Pattern As many of you know, we recently said goodbye to an amazing leader, former CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. We learned many lessons from Tony, the most important one being that the key question in strategy is to ask, “What business are we really in?” On Zappos’ success, he told us, “We
Last week I got to spend five and a half hours with one of the most influential strategic thinkers alive today, Gary Hamel. He has written five global best-selling books, published 17 papers in Harvard Business Review, and has taught at London Business School for 30 years.
In March of 2008, the United States’ national public radio system (NPR) seemed to have a fatal and too common choice: to bet on the past rather than the future. It’s the kind of decision that has initiated the fall of many once-great companies: Toys “R” Us, Polaroid, Borders, Macy’s, RadioShack, and BlackBerry, to name
How NPR Leapt Forward in Proximity Read More »
When an airplane hits turbulence, it seeks a new altitude. One without turbulence. Even better, one with tailwinds. Now, COVID has certainly injected turbulence rarely seen in history. But is this turbulence universal? Is every sector of the economy under threat?
Finding Your COVID Altitude Read More »
If you want to predict the path of innovation in your industry, consider one unifying strategic concept: proximity. Introduced by innovation guru Rob Wolcott, proximity is the theory that the production and provision of value moves ever closer to the point of demand. Viewing your industry through this lens can reveal new opportunities, help you
PillPack, Proximity, and the Amazon Future of Pharmacies Read More »
We are dealing with unprecedented change invoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we need more than ever is a sense of hope. So, we’ve taken The Outthinker Process – a strategic process that helps business leaders step outside of conventional thinking to redesign their business models and strategies – and reformed it specifically for what
Four Steps to Outthink COVID Read More »
