This newsletter is sent to more than 1,000 professionals who are rethinking how Design, Business and Technology will work together in the near future. Pass it around by inviting registration at strtgy.design .
Hey, happy Monday,
I know it’s early, but I want to ask you a question: does it happen to you that Facebook brings up pieces of your past? How does it make you feel?
Yesterday, in the “memories” section, a series of photos appear to me taken exactly 10 years ago when I had no idea that I would open my computer today to write this note.
Why do I tell you this?
Because what got me this far in your inbox is the result of a balance between two kinds of strategies that has a lot in common what made Honda great in America, for example, and that can make your business great as well if you decide to give it the right space….
Continue or get right into it↓.
It has happened to me many times as well
I wanted to be a fashion photographer. In fact at that time it seemed like everybody wanted to do it.
In my 20s, in my circle, we all had a hankering to break into photography, to make lots of money by shooting advertising campaigns and see our images printed in the trendiest newspapers, to hang out with models…
I founded a fanzine called Traumnovelle. A reader of this newsletter remembered it and wrote to me saying that he still keeps a copy. I was thrilled!
It was produced by strictly following a few rules, a habit that has stayed with me:
- Only film photographs, preferably self-developed,
- less Photoshop as possible, I would also post the edge of the film, just to show that the framing had taken place in camera,
- styling was in the service of the story, no marquees
The business model was also simple. Everything had to be supported with a single page ad that I would necessarily shoot thematically so as not to distract the reader. I was lucky to sell the first few issues to the maison of a close friend of mine.
Those bound pages were my portfolio. The high point of my work as a photographer.
But it did not work.
Before I took up photography, I wanted to be an art director, and before that a web designer, and before that a programmer…
So many times in my life I have started out firmly on one path but then each time something happened that proved to be more interesting so that I could embark on a new one always with great energy.
Honda had it all wrong, but…
In 1960 Honda wanted to enter America with a strategy that was costing it dearly. It wanted to compete with the Harleys but had neither the design nor the technical ability.
His motorcycles in fact besides looking like Harleys-for-poors were not reliable over long American distances where the engine ran long at high revs…. He was a bgno di sangue but in order not to lose the market position Honda decided to lose money.
The story goes that one Saturday, a Honda team member, to soothe his frustration of this unprofitable strategic situation, straddled his Super Cub, and decided to take a ride up into the hills of Los Angeles.
The Super Cub was a motorcycle that no one had seen yet in those parts. It was not designed for the great American roads, but to be nimble in busy downtowns. It was spartan and fun to ride. It made such an impression that everyone after that ride wanted one….
Who would have thought that, order after order, it would be this bike that would financially support Honda’s entry into America?
Approved strategy vs. Emerging strategy
The initial strategy, that of competing with the Harleys, whatever it takes, is the strategy that is defined by Christensen, the approved strategy. That strategy decided by management, simply because — well simply because there is a management…
It was not in the least in the plans to enter the American market with such a low-value vehicle. No one had thought about it.
But the orders that were coming in were a sign that somehow Honda had managed to pique the interest of customers it would never have considered with its marketing.
These were not customers ripping off Harleys, they were customers with completely different behaviors, needing an agile, easy-to-maintain vehicle to get around the streets of Los Angeles that were becoming increasingly busy.
They are the so-called “non-customers.”
That of using the Super Cub has been the emerging strategy Honda intercepted to enter America. And that was his good fortune.
How much does your way of working allow for signals to identify emerging strategies?
Discovery Driven Strategy
Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, in 1995, after analyzing the patterns that accumulated so many failures, realized that the number one cause was the way strategies were formulated.
The bad habit of estimating market behavior as if it were all predictable, as if one had the glass ball at one’s disposal.
Think about it. Often when a team wants to launch a new project they are asked to project numbers. We’ve all been there.
And we all know what kind of numbers it takes to package to allow the proposal to go through the levels of the organization, ours or the client’s, to get approval.
No one questions whether those projections are correct, the important thing is to have the supporting excel.
No one checks that the conditions exist for those numbers to materialize.
A simple question then needs to be asked: What needs to be proven to be true to make these numbers credible?
Organizations that need to innovate quickly must make the way they make decisions and design strategies more agile.
Anticipating the effects of disruption requires scheduling checkpoints to be tested frequently to see if you are going in the right direction, at the right speed, and with sufficient gasoline.
What discovery do you need to make today for your strategy to make sense?
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
