As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful. Zook and Allen offer some insights below:
- Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”. Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
- Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.
Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:
- Ensure you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
- Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
- Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
- Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values? Are they adhered to on a daily basis?
The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.