If You’re in a Dogfight, Become a Cat!: Strategies for Long-Term Growth

The Origins of Modern Business Strategy Thinking

THE SEARCH FOR winning strategies and management best practices that drive long-term profitable growth is not new. When I started my business career in the late 1970s, Michael Porter had just published How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy,¹ now widely considered one of the most influential pillars of modern business strategy thinking. In this seminal work, Porter established “Five Forces”—essentially the underlying competitive characteristics of companies operating within a given industry—to explain why some enterprises are inherently more profitable than others (figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Porter’s Five Forces framework

Following Porter’s logic, managers were advised to seek out businesses that had strong bargaining power over buyers and suppliers, low threats of new entry from similar or substitute products, and sustainable competitive advantages that would limit competitive rivalry. It’s hard to argue against such a prescription. After all, who wouldn’t want to operate in such a business environment? But Porter offered little guidance on how to position one’s business, other than suggesting that executing either a lowest-cost or best-product strategy is essential to winning in the marketplace.

In essence, Porter’s Five Forces framework—still taught in many MBA programs—gave credence to the notion that there are inherently “good” and “bad” industries, more or less conducive to superior financial results. I disagree and will argue that there are winners in every industry, regardless of the competitive challenges facing incumbents, provided that managers successfully break from industry norms to create meaningfully differentiated products and services. I’ll also suggest that choosing between lowest cost and best quality is a false dichotomy, as there is a far richer set of performance attributes and differentiated target market positions that companies can exploit to create compelling and profitable consumer value propositions.

Another major contribution to strategic management thinking that gained wide acceptance in the 1970s was introduced by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the premier management consulting firms. In 1970, BCG founder Bruce Henderson created the growth–share matrix, in which companies were classified in one of four quadrants based on their market share and the overall industry growth rate (figure 1.2).² Companies with high market shares in fast-growing industries were designated as “stars,” which managers were urged to aggressively pursue. Better yet, BCG suggested that even when stars begin to mature, as evidenced by slowing industry growth rates, their high market shares would likely continue to yield sizeable cash flows that could be harvested as “cash cows” to invest in new star opportunities.

Figure 1.2 BCG growth–share matrix

Not surprisingly, BCG counseled companies to avoid getting into businesses in the “dog” quadrant of low market share and slow (or even negative) growth, and to divest any such businesses from their portfolio.

Both Porter and BCG advanced a somewhat fatalistic view that the inherent structural characteristics of individual business units and industries largely dictated business performance. Echoing this sentiment, Warren Buffett once wittily observed: “With few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”³

This structuralist view of markets and competition was widely accepted at the time and undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of business conglomerates in the 1970s and 1980s. Corporations like ITT, United Technologies, and General Electric (GE) were run as diversified business portfolios, with each unit being evaluated by management on an ongoing basis to determine whether its role was to drive growth, to harvest cash flows, or to be divested. Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, was an aggressive proponent of this management mindset. Shortly after becoming CEO, Welch publicly declared that any GE business unit that could not achieve a first or second market share position in its industry would have to be immediately fixed, or be sold or closed. During his CEO tenure over the ensuing twenty years, GE divested 117 businesses⁴ and acquired nearly a thousand others, increasing GE’s market cap by nearly $500 billion along the way.⁵

It’s hard to argue with Welch’s success,⁶ but what does this business philosophy imply for mere mortals—the legions of business managers or business school students—who, unlike Warren Buffett and GE, don’t have the luxury of buying and selling companies? Many readers of this book may be seeking employment in or already working for a company that is not a BCG star, operating in an industry that doesn’t score particularly well in Porter’s Five Forces framework. Does this imply the inevitability of being stuck in a dog business with little prospect of winning in the marketplace?

In this book, I will make the case that effective business strategy and execution can trump industry structure, even in industries that Warren Buffett might think have a bad reputation. I’ll provide numerous case studies to highlight companies and brands that achieved outstanding success despite the challenge of operating in mature, brutally competitive industries—e.g., Southwest Airlines and Yellow Tail wine.

Of course, business strategy thinking has evolved considerably since the advent of the Porter and BCG doctrines of the 1970s. In the ensuing forty years, business researchers and academics have advanced theories on management best practices, frameworks to explain disruptive business dynamics, the characteristics of breakthrough product differentiation, and the importance of business alignment to support effective strategy execution. I will explore each of these major developments in the following sections.

The Quixotic Search for Management Best Practices

In the 1980s, attention shifted in some quarters from a focus on industry structure to the search for specific management techniques and behaviors to promote business success. One notable attempt to address this issue—In Search of Excellence, by McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, Jr.—went on to become the best-selling business book of all time after its publication in 1982.⁷

The premise of In Search of Excellence was straightforward and alluring: by studying the business practices of successful companies, the authors argued that it is possible to discern specific management behaviors that can be adopted by any company to promote superior performance.

Peters and Waterman made field trips to forty-three successful companies to observe business operations and to interview senior executives. Based on their analysis, the two McKinsey consultants identified eight basic principles of management effectiveness—for example, having a bias for action, staying close to your customer, promoting productivity through people, and sticking to the knitting that your company knows best. Stated in such broad-brush terms, it seemed reasonable to accept these principles as hallmarks of sound business management.

But as legions of business executives combed through the pages of In Search of Excellence for useful tips on how to transform their companies into market leaders, a nagging doubt began to emerge. Several of the companies profiled in the book as exemplars of best practice suffered significant falls from grace: Kodak, Kmart, Delta Air Lines, Wang Laboratories, and Dana Holding Corporation, all of which eventually went bankrupt. This raised troubling questions. Were the companies that Peters and Waterman studied really excellently managed? And were the eight pillars of effective management identified by the authors really necessary, and sufficient to drive superior business performance?

Despite growing concerns with the validity and usefulness of In Search of Excellence, the powerful allure of unlocking the management secrets of business success attracted other researchers, most notably Jim Collins. Collins has authored six books over the past twenty-five years similar in concept to In Search for Excellence, including Built to Last, Good to Great, and Great by Choice, which have collectively sold over ten million copies.⁸

Collins distinguished his work by the rigor of his research methodology. For example, Collins applied a matched-pair case method, where each successful company in his sample was paired with a lesser-performing company from the same industry over a common time frame to help isolate the differences in management practices that could account for the observed differences in financial performance. To select his samples, Collins established strict performance criteria that successful companies had to meet over a long period. And finally, Collins used extensive data analysis—reviewing thousands of pages of company reports, books, academic case studies, analyst reports and press coverage—to determine the common best practices of high-performing companies. Looking back at Collins’s work from our current perspective of widespread use of “big data” analytics, it is tempting to believe that if one analyzes a sufficiently large sample, statistically significant patterns of best practice behavior can be revealed.

Collins expressed his findings at a high level of abstraction, using clever acronyms, metaphors, and a heavy dose of common sense, which conveyed broad applicability. Examples from his books include:⁹

• Visionary companies set Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs for short).

• The key ingredient that allows a company to become great is having a Level 5 Leader—an executive in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will.

• First Who, Then What—get the right people on the bus, then figure out where the bus might be going.

• Confront the brutal truth of business situations, yet at the same time, never give up hope.

• Be a hedgehog, not a fox—do one thing and do it well in an endeavor that you are passionate about, that you can be the best at, and with which you can actually make a living.

There is nothing wrong with this advice per se, but to assert a predictive link¹⁰ between the espoused management behaviors and successful business outcomes is profoundly flawed for two reasons: the halo effect and the fact that strategy is context sensitive.

Jim Collins’s Management Advice

Have.

Big.

Hairy.

Audacious.

Goals.

The Halo Effect

The halo effect describes the human tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of overall impressions.

Earl Weaver, the Hall-of-Fame former manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once offered some sage advice: “You’re never as bad as you look when you’re losing, nor as good as you seem when you’re winning.” This is as true in business as it is in baseball.

There is considerable academic research to validate Weaver’s observation.¹¹ For example, when a company is enjoying strong, profitable growth and a surging stock price fueling big management bonuses and career advancement, the tendency is for employees and a fawning business press to heap praise on the CEO for his or her strategic vision, leadership, focus, and decisiveness. After all, these are subjective measures and the top executive is obviously doing something right. But if the same company begins to stumble in the marketplace (for any number of reasons), observers are quick to become overly critical of management on the very same subjective terms. In fact, management behaviors may not have changed much, if at all. Rather, company performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression—a halo—that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, and culture.

Look at the accolades heaped on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who has been widely considered one of Silicon Valley’s best executives and lauded by Fortune as their 2010 CEO of the year. In their profile, Fortune described Hastings as a visionary, dynamic, and customer-focused leader with amazing foresight.¹² But less than a year later, the very same CEO was widely vilified as out of touch, arrogant, and unprepared every step of the way when the company’s financial performance suffered from a misguided business initiative. Some analysts and business pundits called for Hastings’s resignation.¹³ But Netflix recovered to become one of the top-performing companies on U.S. stock exchanges between 2011 and 2015, restoring Reed Hastings’s stature as a highly respected CEO.

Apple CEO Tim Cook provides another example of the halo effect—probably deserving neither his early sanctification nor his subsequent fall from grace in the business press. On June 11, 2012, Tim Cook graced the cover of Fortune for a hagiography about the man with perhaps the hardest job in America: to succeed the legendary Steve Jobs, whom Fortune had lionized as “the best CEO of the decade” and “the best entrepreneur of our time.”¹⁴

As the Fortune piece noted: “Considering the widespread handwringing over how rudderless Apple would be without Jobs, it is remarkable how steadily the company has sailed along without him.” Time magazine weighed in with similar praise: “Highly ethical and always thoughtful, he projects calmness but can be tough as nails when necessary. Like the great conductor George Szell, Cook knows that his commitment to excellence is inseparable from the incredible ensemble he leads at Apple.”¹⁵

Such plaudits certainly seemed warranted at the time. When Fortune’s story appeared, Apple was trading at $571 per share, 52 percent higher than when Steve Jobs stepped down ten months earlier. Apple’s stock crested at over $700 per share in the coming months, prompting Forbes and the New York Times to speculate that Apple—already the most valuable company in the world—was well on its way to becoming the first trillion-dollar market cap company.¹⁶

But less than four months later, Apple suffered a few uncharacteristic stumbles in the marketplace. Its stock price dropped by 25 percent and the Wall Street Journal ran a story under the headline “Has Apple Lost Its Cool to Samsung?”¹⁷ As for Tim Cook, in mid-February, 2013, Forbes weighed in with “The Problem with Tim Cook,” raising serious questions about whether Tim Cook was really up to the job as Apple’s CEO.¹⁸

Did Reed Hastings and Tim Cook radically change their fundamental approach to management in a matter of months? Of course not. Rather, these examples illustrate the significance of the halo effect: subjective ratings of managerial performance are inextricably correlated with overall corporate performance.

Therefore the analyses by Jim Collins (and earlier by Peters and Waterman) prove only that the halo effect is alive and well, and not that there is a causal or even a predictive link between subjective impressions of managerial practices and business outcomes. Collins deserves credit for the vast amount of information he examined, but if the underlying subjective data aren’t valid, it really doesn’t matter how much information was gathered or how sophisticated the analysis appeared to be. As with Peters and Waterman, several of the companies identified by Jim Collins as exemplars of management best practice have suffered serious falls from grace, including Fannie Mae, Circuit City, Motorola, and Sony.¹⁹

Strategy Is Context Sensitive

Even if some of the management advice set forth in Collins’s books is sound, the notion that there are specific prescriptions for success that are universally applicable in companies from different industries and at different stages of development is at best folly and at worst, dangerous. This philosophy tends to promote strategic rigidity. As we will discover throughout this book, effective business strategy needs to constantly adapt to inevitable shifts in technology, the market, and the competitive landscape. Strategic priorities that are effective in one company may be quite harmful if adopted by another company operating in a different business context.

As a case in point—in the context of Jim Collins’s advice that visionary leaders should adopt Big Hairy Audacious Goals—consider the approach followed by Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM in the 1990s, who spearheaded one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds of all time. When he was asked to share his vision for the company at his first analyst meeting, Gerstner famously replied: “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision! What it needs right now are tough-minded, market-driven, highly effective strategies.”²⁰ In his first full year on the job, Gerstner cut IBM’s headcount in half, shuttered numerous underperforming business units, and engineered an extraordinary $13.6 billion swing in operating profit, from the existential threat of an $8.6 billion loss in 1993 to a $5 billion profit in 1994.

All businesses experience shifts in their competitive landscapes. There are times when an inspiring and audacious vision is highly advantageous and other times when it would distract from the exigencies of more pragmatic imperatives. There are also times when sticking to one’s knitting (a Collins recommendation) is entirely appropriate and other times when such advice would hasten the decline of a disrupted business. And so, the notion that sophisticated analysis can uncover timeless and universal truths about management effectiveness is misguided. If there is any timeless advice that executives should embrace, it is that they should continuously adapt business strategy to anticipate and respond to changing circumstances. Effective business strategy is inherently dynamic.

The Need for Continuous Innovation

Shortly after Jim Collins published his first two books about the secrets of enduring business success,²¹ Clayton Christensen published his seminal work on disruptive technology. Christensen advanced a theory that strong market forces pose grave and often insurmountable threats to incumbent market leaders across virtually all industries. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, Christensen argued that widely accepted management best practices advocated by Peters and Waterman and Jim Collins—e.g., stay close to your customers and stick to the knitting of what you do best—were unwittingly sowing the seeds of business failure.²²

The implications of Christensen’s thesis were stark, startling, and notable, for two reasons. First is its broad applicability. Despite its name—disruptive technology—Christensen’s theory applies to any industry, whether high- or low-tech or whether product- or service-based. Examples covered later in this book will expand on the disruptive forces that have reshaped the competitive balance in industries as diverse as steel, book publishing, computers, travel agencies, and health services. In some cases, industries were disrupted by breakthrough technologies, but in many others, the impetus for industry disruption came from mashups of low-tech components or innovations in business models, not new product technology. For example, Wikipedia’s ascendancy at the expense of Encyclopædia Britannica certainly depended on Internet technology, but walk-in medical clinics, now prevalent in Walmart, CVS, and other retail chains are primarily based on a new business model for routine medical services offering more convenience and lower prices than traditional doctor office visits (table 1.1).

TABLE 1.1

Industry Examples of Disruptive Technologies

Disruptive Technology	Incumbent Product
Digital photography	Film
Wikipedia	Traditional encyclopedias
Online booking services	Travel agents
Ultrasound	X-ray imaging
Walk-in medical clinics	Primary care physicians
Minimills	Integrated steel mills
Personal computers	Minicomputers and mainframes

The second notable aspect of disruptive technology theory is the elegant simplicity with which Christensen sheds light on the central questions addressed in his book:

• Why do companies have such a difficult time sustaining market leadership?

• Why are newcomers—rather than incumbent market leaders—so often the ones to introduce disruptive technologies and business models?

• What should incumbents do about it?

I’ll have a lot more to say about Christensen’s work later, but the essence of his argument is that market leaders have strong incentives to prioritize the current needs of their best and most demanding customers. After all, managers are supposed to respond to the marketplace and to compete aggressively to protect their core business against traditional competitors (who are trying to steal the best customers with even more sophisticated products and services). The net result in many industries is a feature/function arms race where competitors strive to outdo each other with continuous incremental improvements to state-of-the-art products.²³ The resulting product performance trajectory eventually overserves a growing number of consumers who do not value—or want to to pay for—ever-improving best-in-class products.

Overserved markets open the door for disruptive technology players with products that initially are good enough to serve the needs of some customers, often at attractive low prices. For example, the first crude personal computers (e.g., the Apple II) that entered the consumer market in the 1970s were no match for the powerful minicomputers and workstations at the time, but provided an affordable entry point for tech-savvy consumers.

The most demanding customers in the marketplace initially exhibit little interest in such “inferior” products, and incumbent market leaders are generally dismissive of disruptive technologies, for fear of tarnishing their reputation for product excellence or cannibalizing their high-end product margins. But over time, the performance of low-end disruptive technologies steadily improve, making them an increasingly attractive alternative to existing products. In many industries, disruptive technologies eventually render legacy products obsolete, ushering in a completely new set of competitors and product performance norms. This pattern of creative destruction²⁴ played out repeatedly in each of the product categories noted in table 1.1.

Christensen went on to refine his theory of disruptive technology across a range of industries and more recently extended his framework to explore dynamic changes occurring in education, health care, and even in the performance of national economies.²⁵ His work is widely considered to be one of the most significant contributions to business strategy theory.²⁶

But in many ways, Christensen has become a victim of his own success, as the term disruption is now being inappropriately applied in a wide array of business contexts, often bearing little resemblance to the author’s original scope or intent. For example, nary an entrepreneur seeking venture capital funding these days fails to hail his or her startup as a disruptive enterprise, regardless of actual business circumstances. And established companies are also staking a claim to disruptive products and services. In launching A.M. Crunchwraps, the chief marketing officer of Taco Bell recently gushed: “We’re just getting started with breakfast. Our aim is to boldly disrupt the category.”²⁷ In addition, a whole cottage industry of self-proclaimed disruption experts has emerged offering consulting services, conferences, and seminars to cash in on the popularity of Christensen’s disruptive technology framework.²⁸

The misuse of the disruptive technology framework has prompted some critics to question the validity of Christensen’s work. For example, in one particularly harsh polemic, Harvard historian Jill Lepore recently called Christensen’s work “a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence.”²⁹

Ironically, if Christensen’s research deserves to be questioned, it is for being too narrowly focused on one particular explanation of industry disruption. For example, in 2007, he told Business Week that “the prediction of the [disruptive technology] theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone,” adding, “History speaks pretty loudly on that.”³⁰ Apple’s iPhone did not fit Christensen’s preoccupation with industry disruption starting at the low end of the market. According to Christensen, high-end, closed-system players like Apple will inevitably be disrupted by lower-cost, open-system entrants like Android.

But in fact, there is a class of highly disruptive products that follows a very different market development trajectory than that advanced by Christensen. Specifically, high-end disruptors aim at underserved customers, initially offering substantially superior product performance at premium prices, before expanding their market reach by lowering prices (and possibly performance). For example, when FedEx launched, it rapidly gained market penetration by offering overnight delivery that was faster and more expensive than competing parcel delivery services. Subsequently, FedEx introduced two-day delivery services at lower prices to expand its market reach. Similarly, Amazon initially marketed the Kindle at $399, with superior performance to existing e-readers (and to hardcover books, as perceived by tech-savvy consumers). But over time, Amazon reduced its e-reader price to as low as $79, while improving performance, which considerably broadened their market reach. Apple followed a similar high-end disruptive technology trajectory with the iPod, from a launch price of $399 to as low as $99 over time.

Christensen’s original disruptive technology framework and the high-end disruptive technology examples noted in figure 1.3 have two common characteristics: they represent opposite market entry points—high performance and price, or low performance and price; and it usually takes years for the full impact of either form of disruption to fully play out in transforming an industry.

But what if a disruptive innovation could enter the market offering vastly superior performance and lower prices than current products? That’s precisely the compelling value proposition of “big bang” disruptors that can overwhelm stable businesses very rapidly, as described in a recent book by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes.³¹

For example, consider the market for portable and in-car GPS navigation devices from Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan Navigation, which thrived in early 2000s. As is usual with sustaining technologies, continuous improvements in these devices enhanced performance and lowered prices. But in 2007, Google Maps for smartphones was released. This was at once cheaper (i.e., free), better (i.e., more accurate and up to date), more convenient (i.e., no need for a specialized additional device), and more personalized (i.e., linked to all the other things on a user’s smartphone) all at once. The market for portable GPS devices immediately collapsed, with around a hundred million users downloading Google Maps in the first year. A year later, that number had doubled.³²

Other examples of products that have suffered big bang disruption include cameras, pagers, wristwatches, maps, books, travel guides, flashlights, home telephones, dictation recorders, cash registers, alarm clocks, answering machines, yellow pages, wallets, keys, phrase books, transistor radios, personal digital assistants, remote controls, newspapers and magazines, directory assistance, travel and insurance agents, restaurant guides, and pocket calculators.

The accelerating pace of big bang disruption is being driven by the increasing role of software rather than hardware in creating product-performance gains and by the substantial decline in software-driven development costs.

Downes and Nunes melodramatically warn: “You can’t see big bang disruption coming. You can’t stop it. You can’t overcome it. Old-style disruption posed the innovator’s dilemma. Big bang disruption is the innovator’s disaster. And it will be keeping executives in every industry in a cold sweat for a long time to come.”³³

Of course, not all industries are equally prone to big bang disruption. But these evolving theories of disruptive technology dynamics nonetheless suggest that managers should expect continuous upheaval in product lifecycles and industry structure. The important implication is that companies can no longer expect to sustain long-term competitive advantage, unless they are prepared to continuously disrupt themselves. This is precisely the point made by Rita McGrath in her recent book, aptly called The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business.³⁴ McGrath notes that for generations of managers schooled and incentivized to achieve long-term competitive advantage, it will be difficult to master a critical new management skill: recognizing when to pull the plug on product and market positions that are still enjoying the rewards of strong market performance.

Thus, the first strategic imperative to learn from the evolution of thinking on business strategy over the past four decades is the relentless and accelerating need for continuous innovation.

The Need for Meaningful Differentiation

In my business strategy course at Columbia, I often share a personal anecdote of a mundane shopping trip I recently made to purchase a bottle of shampoo. Not being the normal consumer of household staples in my home, nor being well schooled in the nuances of hair care, I was immediately overwhelmed by the task at hand when I arrived at the shampoo aisle in my local drugstore. There before me was a dizzying array of shampoo bottles in every imaginable shape, size, and color, each proclaiming to deliver More Body! Extra Sheen! Intense Softness! To my untrained eye, this cornucopia of choice presented an unfathomable challenge, the resolution of which was the selection of a now-forgotten brand in an attractive black plastic bottle adorned with white-and-gold print.

There is nothing notable or remarkable about this vignette other than to note that in too many consumer categories, producers jockey for competitive advantage, endlessly replicating each other’s ephemerally distinctive features, yielding a loss of meaningful differentiation across the category as a whole. Sure, there are tangible and intangible distinctions that separate high-priced entries from budget labels in many categories, but in reality, within the consideration set of any given consumer, meaningful differentiation is often missing.

Youngme Moon captured the essence of this pervasive problem in her beautifully written book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd:³⁵

In so many consumer categories, differentiation has become hard to come by because we have fallen into a pulse of competition that in and of itself has become an impediment to its emergence…. Businesses that find themselves locked into this particular pattern of competitive engagement have become masters at producing product categories filled with heterogeneous homogeneity, or dissimilar clones if you will. Which is to say that they have become masters of a particular form of imitation. Not differentiation, but imitation. Yet because this particular form of imitation is cloaked in the vernacular of differentiation, the myth of competitive separation lives on in the minds of the managers running these firms. Meanwhile, the emperor has no clothes and most consumers know it.³⁶

If you have any doubt that this problem is real, ask yourself if you can clearly articulate the compelling differences in consumer value between Mitsubishi and Mazda cars, Crest and Colgate toothpaste, or Huggies and Pampers diapers. Store brands have capitalized on declining brand distinctiveness by gaining share across most categories of consumer packaged goods.

When confronted by this challenge, many of my students question whether it is possible to create meaningful differentiation in consumer packaged goods, household staples, or other products with limited emotional attachment. In their view, it’s easy to envy the genius of innovators like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who have radically transformed global industries with technological wizardry, but no such opportunity exists in mundane categories like carbonated soft drinks, socks, or table wine.

Or does it? Youngme Moon suggests that the key to creating truly innovative and meaningfully differentiated products is to look for weaknesses in the category as a whole, not in individual products or brands. Take socks, for example. The potential vulnerability of this category is the very characteristic that my students assume makes socks impervious to breakthrough innovation: socks are boring! They come in matched pairs, serving purely functional needs (e.g., athletic socks vs. dress socks) that generate little emotional appeal. As a result, there is low brand awareness and little loyalty or willingness to pay premium prices in this category.

But what if one challenged all the underlying category norms that render socks so boring? What if, for example, socks were sold in threesomes, not pairs? And what if none of the socks in a set matched? Or if they came in exceptionally bright and bold patterns that were constantly updated, generating market buzz around the latest designs? You might think that such ideas are preposterous, but if so, I’m guessing that you and your friends are not tweens, who have flocked to LittleMissMatched in droves to purchase just such a product.³⁷

Figure 1.4 LittleMissMatched Sock designs

LittleMissMatched is not alone in upsetting everyday industries. In each case noted in table 1.2, innovative companies recognized the opportunity to deliver value to poorly served customers by reconstructing category norms and industry conventions to create fundamentally new bases of appeal.

Table 1.2

Meaningful Market Differentiation Success Stories

Company	Industry	Industry Norm
LittleMissMatched	Apparel and accessories	Socks are boring.
Swatch	Watches	Watches are functional tools; you only need one.
Cirque du Soleil	Circus/entertainment	Animals are the stars of the circus.
Novo Nordisk	Pharmaceuticals	Insulin is sold to doctors, based primarily on technical merit.
Nintendo	Gaming	The market will always reward more powerful product performance.
Casella Family Brands	Wine	Wine is for special occasions, mostly consumed by aficionados.
CNN	Television news	News is delivered in three defined time slots during the day.
Curves	Fitness	The market will always value more sophisticated equipment and high-intensity fitness classes.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne also focused attention on the importance of meaningful differentiation in their widely acclaimed book, Blue Ocean Strategy, published in 2005.³⁸ The title draws on a marine metaphor of red and blue oceans. Red oceans refer to traditional markets, which operate within the boundaries of well-defined category norms (i.e., the third column in table 1.2), in which shark-like competitors bloody each other in an intense battle for a share of existing customers. Companies that swim in red oceans generally face slow growth, low margins and relentless price pressure. Kim and Mauborgne argue that companies can create blue oceans of uncontested market opportunity by meaningfully differentiating their products to serve not only their existing customers but also a potentially large segment of new consumers previously untapped by red ocean players.

When properly executed, blue ocean strategies can create enormous value by tapping into large unserved markets—as Nintendo did with its Wii home video game, which appealed to mass-market consumers rather than just hard-core game enthusiasts—and rendering competition irrelevant by creating value in a fundamentally different way that is difficult to replicate, as was the case with Cirque du Soleil and CNN.

The breakout success of winners in blue ocean markets eventually attracts competition, turning blue oceans red. For example, many of the exemplars of blue ocean strategy cited in Kim and Mauborgne’s book have subsequently encountered stiff competition, reaffirming the need for continuous innovation.

Thus, the second strategic imperative emerging from the evolution of business strategy thinking is the need for meaningful differentiation in the marketplace. But even if companies succeed in the metaphorical feat of becoming a cat in a dogfight, the question isn’t whether they’ll find themselves in yet another dogfight, but when. Long-term profitable growth requires an ongoing ability to anticipate and respond to an evolving market.

The Need for Business Alignment

It’s one thing to recognize the strategic imperative of continuous innovation aimed at creating meaningfully differentiated, market-transforming products. It’s another to get an organization to align its capabilities, business practices, resources, and management incentives to strongly support the execution of this mission. The harsh reality is, in too many companies, there is a serious disconnect between the CEO’s stated desire to deliver innovative customer-pleasing products and the actual day-to-day management directives that undermine this objective.

Think about your own business experience. I suspect you may have already witnessed examples of management practices that inhibit continuous innovation and meaningful product differentiation.

Sales

Salesperson compensation is often driven by short-term sales quotas, which are most easily attained by promoting proven products. New products—particularly those that require considerable effort to educate new buyers on new value propositions, or that may damage existing client relationships or cannibalize existing product sales—often get limited salesperson attention. Moreover, internal competition for advertising funds, trade promotions, and other resources often rob new product entries of the critical resources required for success.

Finance

Chief financial officers often have a limited appetite for sustained investment in R&D for breakthrough innovations with delayed paybacks. For example, in one survey of over 400 publicly traded companies, 80 percent of CFOs stated that if it looked like their company would miss earnings expectations, they would cut R&D and other discretionary budgets to meet forecasts.³⁹ Product R&D teams frequently struggle with uncertain funding, which is tied to annual budget cycles and susceptible to lapses in management interest and leadership changes that wipe out project sponsorship. New product initiatives are often held to unrealistic development deadlines, payback thresholds, and business plans with metrics ill-suited for early-stage ventures, resulting in high mortality rates.⁴⁰

Human Resources

Cross-disciplinary new product development teams are often deprived of critical management skills by business unit general managers who hoard their best talent to focus on established business needs. Project leaders who try valiantly, but ultimately unsuccessfully, to launch risky new businesses are often demoted or fired, sending a strong signal to the rest of the organization about the personal risks of associating with innovative ventures.

Executive Management

Chief executive officers express near unanimous recognition of the importance of continuous innovation to their organization, but few provide effective oversight. According to a 2013 PwC survey of 246 global CEOs, 97 percent cited innovation as a top corporate priority, yet only 37 percent reported that they personally exerted leadership in this area (up from only 12 percent three years earlier).⁴¹ In a 2008 survey, McKinsey reported that while 70 percent of senior executives identified innovation as one of their top three priorities, only 27 percent claimed that innovation was fully integrated into their corporate strategic planning process.⁴² As a result, McKinsey found that nearly two-thirds of senior executives admitted being only “somewhat,” “a little,” or “not at all” confident in their management decisions regarding innovation.⁴³

Most CEOs have a sizeable component of their annual executive compensation tied to earnings per share and stock price, which incentivizes short-term results and financial engineering over long-term reinvestment in innovation and growth. While one could argue that such compensation incentives align the interests of the CEO and the shareholders, the reality is that the proportion of corporate earnings going into share buybacks and dividends at the expense of reinvestments in corporate growth has recently reached unprecedentedly high levels. For example, in 2014, spending on buybacks and dividends by publicly traded U.S. corporations surpassed the companies’ combined net income.⁴⁴ Data analyzed by William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts confirm that since the early 1980s, when corporate restrictions on open-market buybacks were greatly eased, dividends and stock buybacks have absorbed over 80 percent of S&P 500 net income, limiting capital available for reinvestment in corporate growth.⁴⁵

As one investment fund manager observed: “You can only go so far with financial engineering before you actually have to have a business with real growth. Companies have done about all that they can in terms of maximizing the ability to do those buybacks.”⁴⁶ Consider IBM, for example. Between 2008 and 2013, it invested 102 percent of cumulative net income on stock buybacks and dividends. Over this time span, IBM’s stock price nearly doubled, despite declining revenues and operating cash flows. But after reporting its fourteenth straight quarterly revenue decline in Q3 2015, IBM shares sagged to a five-year low, nearly 40 percent below their 2013 peak.

The bottom line is that there is often a serious disconnect between a company’s stated strategic intent for innovation-driven growth and its actual management behaviors. We will explore the reasons for such disconnects later in this book, but suffice it to say here that contributing causes include misaligned incentives, inadequate innovation business practices, and—perhaps at a deeper level—human frailties, including the fear of the unknown, hubris, complacency, and resistance to change, that undermine effective management.

Business researchers have long recognized the need to align corporate capabilities, resources, incentives, and culture to support strategic priorities. For example, early in my career as a strategy consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton,⁴⁷ a new theory on management effectiveness emerged under the rubric “capabilities-driven strategy.” In their seminal book Competing for the Future, C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel argued that market leaders owed their success to an identifiable set of core competencies, which allowed them to outperform competitors.⁴⁸ These competencies (or capabilities, as they were later called) could be engineering, product design, manufacturing expertise, supply chain optimization, or marketing prowess that enabled those who mastered them to compete in distinctive ways.⁴⁹

For example, through the lens of capabilities-driven strategy, Walmart can be seen to be exploiting their expertise in global sourcing and supply chain optimization to build a formidable competitive advantage: offering wide product selection at everyday low prices. These same capabilities were exploited by IKEA, along with product-design expertise, to create the world’s largest furniture enterprise. Nike exploited its expertise in marketing and product development to achieve global market leadership in sports equipment and apparel.

Companies pursuing a capabilities-driven strategy were encouraged to formally recognize the strategic importance of their designated core capabilities, to invest heavily to ensure ongoing competitive superiority, and to exploit market opportunities that could extend their areas of expertise.

This theme was picked up by Bain consultants Chris Zook and James Allen in their 2001 book Profit from the Core and the sequel, Beyond the Core.⁵⁰ Zook and Allen argue that most growth strategies fail to deliver value—or even destroy it—primarily because they wrongly diversify from the core business. The authors contend that building market power in a well-defined core remains the key source of competitive advantage and the most viable platform for successful expansion.

To back up their stick-to-your-knitting prescription, Zook and Allen analyzed the outcomes of hundreds of new business ventures to show that the likelihood of success declined considerably as companies moved farther afield from their proven core competencies. Each new business launch in the analysis was classified in terms of the number of adjacency steps from the core business. For example, targeting a new geography or class of customer was considered to be one adjacency step from the core. A new product technology would add a second step and new distribution channels would add yet another distancing step.

Zook and Allen’s analysis showed that business launches involving only one adjacency step achieved a 37 percent success rate, beating the 30 percent success rate overall. A second step reduced the chance of success to 28 percent. And for new businesses that were three adjacency steps removed from the core, the success rate dropped below 10 percent (figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 New business success rate vs. distance from the core. Source: Chris Zook, Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abdandoning Your Roots (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

For example, while Walmart was perfecting its core competency of supply chain management, it sought additional growth in adjacent steps—e.g., introducing groceries at existing big-box stores and expanding its everyday low price concept to Sam’s Club. In contrast, Kmart failed to invest in upgrading its core capabilities, while pursuing distracting acquisitions in new product categories and geographies, including Sports Authority, OfficeMax, Waldenbooks, and Builders Square. Kmart divested many of these acquisitions before ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 2002. In a similar vein, American Express failed in its attempt to diversify into brokerage and insurance services, while its core business has continued to prosper with adjacent expansions into a number of new consumer and business credit categories.

The clear message from proponents of capabilities-driven strategy was that executional considerations—i.e., corporate competence—should guide growth strategy, with a clear bias toward opportunities that draw on existing strengths over those that require the development of new skills.

Of course, a danger of this “inside-out” approach is that it may encourage companies to cling to outdated skills and assets or to define their market opportunities too narrowly. Consider the newspaper industry, for example. Following a capabilities-driven strategy, even as digital news aggregators and web-based classifieds, job search, and advertising players (e.g., Craigslist, Monster, and Google) began encroaching on their business, many publishers clung to a belief that they were in the newspaper business. From this perspective, many publishers believed that they could continue to thrive by drawing on their deep capabilities to compile, print, and distribute newspapers in served markets. But in retrospect, publishing executives have now learned that they are actually in the journalism business, which requires very different capabilities and business models to succeed in the post-digital era. In a similar vein, while Walmart and IKEA have long been market leaders in the big-box retail sector, both are now playing catch-up in their efforts to augment their brick-and-mortar retailing with webstore capabilities.

Recognizing the potential limitations of capabilities-driven strategy, a competing school of strategic thought advocates outside-in thinking for what may be called “customer-driven strategy.” In their 2010 book Strategy from the Outside In, George Day and Christine Moorman argue that capabilities-driven strategy needs to be turned on its head.⁵¹ In their words,

Inside-out companies narrowly frame their strategic thinking by asking, “What can the market do for us?” rather than, “What can we do for the market?” The consequences of inside-out thinking can be seen in the way many business-to-business firms approach customer solutions. The inside-out view is that “solutions are bundles of products and services that help us sell more.” The outside-in view is that “the purpose of a solution is to help our customers find value and make money—to our mutual benefit.”

There is an intuitive appeal to Day and Moorman’s perspective, but like any theory, there are limitations to its application. Undisciplined execution of outside-in strategies run the risk of overextending a company’s ability to execute and diluting a brand’s identity. As we will see repeatedly in this book, the strongest brands are defined as much by what they won’t do as by what they do.

Recognizing the importance of operational excellence prompted another influential strand of strategy thinking over the past three decades. In the 1980s, shaken by the rise of the Japanese car industry at their expense, the Big Three U.S. automakers focused considerable attention on understanding the methods of lean product development and lean manufacturing pioneered by Toyota Motor Corporation. This is recounted in James Womack’s and Daniel Jones’s 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World.⁵²

Ironically, Toyota developed its storied Toyota Production System by applying the teachings of an American scholar, W. Edwards Deming, who initially found Japanese executives more receptive to his recommendations than their American counterparts.⁵³ Deming is widely viewed as the father of the Total Quality Management and Six Sigma methods for business process improvement that gained widespread acceptance after being embraced by General Electric CEO Jack Welch in 1995.

The focus on operational excellence took a temporary backseat during dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. In those heady days, the prevailing wisdom was for startups to race for market penetration at whatever cost. Venture capital funding poured into startups that were long on vision, but lacking in executional capability. This mindset was epitomized by the meteoric rise and fall of Webvan, which went from IPO to bankruptcy in sixteen months, after burning through nearly $2 billion in capital by overextending its unproven web-based grocery business in twenty-six cities.

In the humbling wake of the bursting dot-com bubble and a deep global recession at the turn of the millennium, executive attention returned to the blocking and tackling of disciplined operational management as a prerequisite to successful strategy implementation. In Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, consultant Ram Charan and then-CEO of Honeywell, Larry Bossidy,⁵⁴ write that their thesis “was based on our observation that the discipline of getting things done was what differentiated companies that succeeded from those that just muddled through or failed.”⁵⁵ In their view, execution trumped strategy as the key driver of success.

Thus, the third strategic imperative advanced as business strategy thinking has evolved over the past four decades is the need for operational excellence and business alignment—i.e., assuring that corporate capabilities, resources, incentives, and business culture and processes are properly aligned to support a company’s strategic intent.

Both strategy and execution matter

Summing It Up

Reflecting on the business strategy perspectives shared in this chapter, I believe that each has a contribution to make in answering the overarching questions posed at the beginning of this book:

• Why is it so hard to achieve and sustain long-term profitable growth?

• How can businesses achieve this?

Business strategy books tend to view the business landscape through the lens of a particular theoretical construct, which leads to a normative prescription for more effective management and better performance. When such theories are supported by credible logic, substantiating data, and relevant case studies, they often take on a life of their own; they are applied by acolytes far beyond the authors’ original intent or the logical limits of the theory’s extensibility.

For example, while Clayton Christensen made profoundly important contributions to our understanding of product life-cycle dynamics, there are other forms of disruptive technologies that are also significantly reshaping the competitive landscape. Executives would be well advised to be on the lookout not only for low-end and new-market disruptions as defined by Christensen but for high-end and big bang disruptions as well.

While researchers have debated the merits of pursuing an inside-out capabilities-driven strategy, or an outside-in customer-driven approach, in reality CEOs need not feel forced to make an unnecessary choice between these two opposing perspectives. A balanced view of both constructs can help guide effective strategy formulation. For example, Apple clearly pursued an outside-in strategy for the creation of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch by anticipating consumer needs in music and mobile computing. These devices extended Apple far beyond its roots as a computer company, in fact prompting Steve Jobs to change the company’s name from Apple Computer to Apple in 2007. But as Apple continues to seek new opportunities for growth, it is also focusing on five adjacencies to apply its core technologies—automotive, home automation, health and fitness, payments, and gaming—each of which could be significant enough to support a future large-cap business of its own.

Deploying capabilities-driven and customer-driven strategies in combination is a more nuanced view than presented by strict advocates of one theoretical construct or the other and can be highly effective.

Finally, while researchers and practitioners have made important contributions in identifying management best practices, it is overreach to say that Jim Collins’s recommendations are universally applicable or to accept Charan and Bossidy’s assertion that execution trumps strategy in determining business outcomes. Business strategies can be flawed in concept or execution, but both are vitally important in achieving successful outcomes.

It is my intent in this book to integrate key elements of the most influential strategy thinking of the last forty years with my own practical business experience. In the simplest terms, I will make the case that there are three strategic imperatives that drive sustained profitable growth: