Expanding the enterprise: Breaking the barriers to collaborative product development.

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Dr Damigos; PhD

Growth through Focus: A Blueprint for Driving Profitable Expansion

Rather than seek increased revenues and profits by expanding products and markets, companies should follow a seven-step strategy for achieving more with less.

by Sanjay Khosla and Mohanbir Sawhney

Illustration by Philippe Lardy

Faced with economic headwinds, many global corporations are struggling to grow their businesses profitably. In the consumer packaged goods business, for example, the worldwide recession has hurt premium brands as consumers have traded down to cheaper brands, private labels, or generics. In the retailing business, same-store sales are flat or declining for numerous companies. Meanwhile, many business leaders continue to seek growth by extending their existing product lines and brands, as well as by entering new geographic regions. After all, growth is supposed to be about “more” — more products on the shelf, more categories, more brands, and more markets.
However, this approach is exactly the opposite of what business leaders should do to drive increased revenues and profits. A typical “growth through more” strategy diffuses the organization’s efforts. It increases the complexity of the organization and its operations. We have found that “growth through less,” or more precisely “growth through focus,” is the best prescription for growth, regardless of the economic environment. This conclusion is based on our own experience in three well-known companies — Kraft Foods, Unilever, and Fonterra Brands (a dairy products business based in New Zealand) — on three continents over 10 years. In all three cases, a deliberate strategy of focusing on a few markets, brands, and categories produced impressive revenue and profit expansion. We have learned that seemingly mature businesses can be energized by making fewer but larger bets and by focusing relentlessly on executing a simple but powerful vision.
Growth through focus is not as easy as choosing what strategic bets to make. Rather, it requires the leadership team to follow a systematic approach that spans everything from strategy and vision to execution and measurement. We propose a framework that consists of seven steps that an organization must go through in its quest for growth through focus. Our framework is grounded in three key ideas: focus in strategy, simplicity in communication, and empowerment in execution.........

Innovation: Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

Clayton Christensen asked 2 questions in a presentation:

1. Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time (i.e., to innovate again and again)? and
2. Is innovation really as much of a random event as it seems?


His tongue-in-cheek conclusion is that the principles of good management taught in places like Harvard actually sew the seeds of failure and ensure that innovation doesn't succeed.

These are the accepted management principles he faults for the failure of innovation at most firms:
1. You should listen to your customers to develop innovation ideas
2. Focus your investments on those opportunities with the highest margins
3. Outsource whatever possible, whatever is not your "core competency"
4. The value of an innovation can be expressed in net-present-value terms
5. You should ignore fixed and sunk costs, and focus on marginal outlays
6. Large markets represent the biggest growth opportunties
7. Understanding the customer is the key to successful innovation

Disruptive technologies often aren't as "good" as the incumbent technology or product, but are still highly useful to customers. Some innovations make imminent sense in a vacuum but are simply impossible for incumbent companies to do.

To what extend CRM Empowers Growth?

O2ibm

Visit this group The CRM tools can empower customer facing employees to help organizations achieve growth strategy.  In this current economic downturn, with increased hyper-competition the pressure is on for the organizations to continually keep track of customer pulse.  This will enable the organizations understand changing customer need constantly. CRM tools can play a pivotal role to create 4 best practices to empower customer facing employees to achieve extraordinary, sustainable results. Attain real-world benefits such as: Increased growth:  With information at their finger tips, employees can cross sell products and services to the customers.  CRM helps create repository of customer behavior at every touch point, thus helping organizations build a detailed virtual client model. Enhanced productivity: With centralized access to all the customer specific data, CRM tools can enhance the productivity of the employees. Achieve short-term goals:  With the access to entire customer information, the management can align employee performance payment to achieve short term goals. Improved collective thinking, flexibility and consistency: This is huge value added feature that the newer CRM tools bring to the organization.  As they are Enterprise 2.0 enabled, they help build a community of customers.  By enabling seamless feedback from the customers at the different touch points in the value chain, the CRM tools can convert a consumer to a ‘prosumer’.  The collective knowledge can be harnessed to build a product or offer a service that will continually add value to the customers and increase the bottom line of the company.  This also helps ever increasing fickle minded consumer to be more loyal to the brand since they are involved in shaping the product. Check out Oracle sponsored white paper here