Strategy

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="3a1fd5a3.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Eclicktick Consulting</B></FONT><B>    </B><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Eclicktick Consulting"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div>                                                   </div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" background="3a2d2b03.jpg"> <div> <A HREF="http://www.alistairdavidson.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.alistairdavidson.com"><U><IMG SRC="37eb6f30.jpg" border=0 width="182" height="243" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></U></A></div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> Featured</div> <div> white paper</div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D2245%2526cid%253D112087,00.html " TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,10"><U>Managing Webmavens: Relationships with Sophisticated Customers via the Internet can Transform Marketing and Speed Innovation</U></A></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D2245%2526cid%253D112087,00.html " TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,10"><U>Pricing Strategy and Execution: an overlooked way to increase revenues and profits</U></A><A HREF="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D2245%2526cid%253D112087,00.html " TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,10"><U> </U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>Strategy</I></div> <div> <I><U>Strategic Thinking</U></I></div> <div> <I>Draft as of January 8, 2004</I></div> <bR> <div> Some random thoughts on strategic thinking, updated irregularly organized alphabetically.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Alignment</B></div> <div> Do your people practices support your business strategy?</div> <div> Does your IT support your business strategy?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Business Model</B></div> <div> How do you plan on making money?</div> <div> How are you going to finance your growth?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Customer Centric</B></div> <div> Does your firm behave as if it is acting on behalf of its customers?</div> <div> Does your firm reward customer loyalty?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Customer Value</B></div> <div> How can you identify customers for whom you are superb value?</div> <div> How can you change the rules of the game so that your ratio of value to price is dramatically different than competitors?</div> <div> How can you improve the way you communicate your value?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Employees</B></div> <div> Are you hiring great employees?</div> <div> Are firing bad employees?</div> <div> Do you give your employees a reason to care about their jobs?</div> <div> Are your employees passionate about working with you?</div> <div> Do you provide training and regular feedback?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Experimentation</B></div> <div> Do you do lots of experiments?</div> <div> Do you measure the experiments?</div> <div> Do you cut off failures quickly and test ideas that are showing promise quickly?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Honesty</B></div> <div> Do you punish people for failure or for learning from failure?</div> <div> Do you really know what your customers think of you, your product, your service and the benefits you are creating for them?</div> <div> Do you listen to what customers complain about and do something about their complaints?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Information Integration</B></div> <div> Can you manage the relationship between proposed actions and projects and resources and dollars?</div> <div> Do you track spending or outcomes?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Multi-Period View</B></div> <div> What is your relationship profitability vs. your transaction profitability? How does it change over your relationship with customers?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Pareto's Law</B></div> <div> Which 20% of your products/customers/services/activities account for the majority of your results/value added/problems?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Quality of Information</B></div> <div> Do you actually know what is going on in your organization?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Reason to Believe</B></div> <div> Why should anyone care that your organization exists?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Resource Allocation</B></div> <div> Where are you putting resources into areas with inadequate payoff?</div> <div> Where are you underinvesting?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Risk Management</B></div> <div> Where are the risks in your business and what are doing about it?</div> <div> What events would trigger a change in your strategy or activities?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sales Cycle</B></div> <div> How can you reduce the risk of buying your product?</div> <div> How can you make it easier to buy your product?</div> <div> How can you shorten your sales cycle?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Selectivity</B></div> <div> Have you decided what you are not going to do and who you are not going to serve?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Solving Problems</B></div> <div> What actions could you take that with one project would solve more than one problem?</div> <div> What is causing this irrational behavior? How can you change the behavior?</div> <div> How can you make it easier for the customer to solve his problem?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Uncertainty</B></div> <div> What is your mix of reversible vs. irreversible decisions?</div> <div> Are you chunking projects so that you can terminate them earlier rather than later if they don't work out?</div> <div> Are you using scenario analysis to evaluate your choices? In other words, do you think through whether proposed strategies work equally well across all your key scenarios?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Value Chain</B></div> <div> What would be the impact of doubling the volume of activity in an activity in your value chain?</div> <div> What would be the impact of contracting it out?</div> <div> What key activities in your value chain are synergistic?</div> <div> What information in your value chain is key to your business?</div> <bR> <div> <I><B>For help with your strategic problems, for strategic problem solving group work, for facilitated strategic and business planning retreats, tunaround strategy development, improvement of business models, restructuring of companies, please contact the author at the addresses below.</B></I></div> <bR> <div> <I>Copyright Alistair Davidson, 2004. All rights reserved.</I></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>