The focus of our newsletter this month is on "strategy" - a complex and challenging task for any company, large or small. In our 15 years of work, consulting to organizations at all stages of the life cycle, seldom have we found an executive team who did not struggle to architect a strategy that moves the company from one stage of development to the next.

There are many theories how a company should go about building a competency in strategy. Clayton Christensen, in his recent Crash Course, cautioned that companies too often wait for a comprehensive set of data to alert them to the need for a shift in course. By then, the market may have moved so far beyond, particularly with a disruptive technology, that the company will never catch up. Dr. Christensen advocated a process that moves from data to consideration of theories and scenarios: one predicts the data that could be the signposts; when the first sets of data emerge, the company makes the strategic shift - in advance of the competition. In this model, the leadership team would:

1.		Imagine various options for the future
2.		Identify the different signposts which signal a shift
3.		Plan for alternative futures
4.		Implement plans when the future starts to emerge

Foster and Kaplan find another compelling view of the challenge of strategy in Creative Destruction. Based on research, the authors assert that virtually all companies "stall out" at the maturity stage of the life cycle and fail to successfully identify new strategies for the next cycle of development. Their research indicates that the few companies who have built this competency - GE and Johnson and Johnson - did so by:

1.		Successfully balancing control versus risk cultures of the company
2.		Building a strong "permission" orientation in the management structure
3.		Viewing strategy as the primary responsibility of executive leadership, VS a process embedded in a function or role of the company
4.		Being willing to "destroy" the core competency of the company in order to build a new future