top of page

“Only 11 percent of executives feel strategic planning truly adds value.”

Harvard Business Review




INTRODUCTION

In an era where rapid transformation is the norm, the traditional strategy process has often lagged, bound by top-down directives that move at the speed of annual reports rather than real-time insights. This whitepaper unveils a revolutionary approach: a dynamic, bottom-up strategy that not only engages employees and stakeholders at all levels but also harnesses the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence.

 

A staggering 89 percent of executives are skeptical about the value of their strategic planning, as reported by the Harvard Business Review. This new strategy process aims to reclaim and revitalize the essence of strategic planning, transforming it into a robust, participative journey.

 

In the following pages, we present a clear 3-step method that discards the echo chamber of executive boardrooms and opens the floodgates to the collective genius of an organization. From the ingenious ideation reminiscent of Adidas North America's resurgence to the AI-driven insights that rival the intellect of top MBA students, we explore how strategic development is evolving from a painstaking process into an exhilarating venture of discovery.





 STEP 1

Spend one hour in your management team meeting to arrive at a common view on the current and desired state of the company’s strategy.

 

Exercise

Each MT member asks themselves the following question: Over the next few years, how is the organization going to reinvent itself and the world around it?


Each writes out their answer in "from-to" statements.

 

Then discuss the answers and evaluate:

  1. Is there consensus on key priorities?

  2. Would our agenda surprise competitors?

  3. Does the strategy imply significant stretch?

 

The answer to these questions will be ‘no’ or ‘not enough’. This is normal. The next step therefore is to discuss as a team what to aim for. For example, “A good strategy will define how we increase relevance, it will aim for having a point of view about the future that ensures consistency, spurs creativity and inspires bravery.”

 

STEP 2

Decide on method, go for a top-down strategy process ‘roll-out’ or open strategy ‘roll-up’.

 

A top-down process can be fast, structured, grounded in consultants’ analysis, and ready for town hall presentations. Responsibility lies with the CEO or often the ‘Chief Strategy Officer’.

 

The downside

A recent Harvard Business Review study found that only 11 percent of executives feel strategic planning truly adds value. A classic process uses only a tiny fraction of the organization’s collective imagination; it's the opposite of an exciting, participative quest to discover new opportunities. It assumes top leadership has a full view of all key trends. It limits the chance to generate game-changing ideas based on having many strategic options, using the wisdom of the crowd.

 

The alternative

A company-wide conversation that is open to employees, customers, external partners. A process that encourages radical thinking and includes new voices. One where you diverge before you converge on key themes.

 

An open strategy process is messier and potentially more time-consuming than the top-down alternative, yet it has the following benefits:

  • More radical and ambitious ideas

  • More granularity in ideas and business plans, therefore more actionability

  • More credibility and commitment, therefore faster adoption and execution

 

 

 

OPEN STRATEGY EXAMPLE

Adidas North America


Context

In 2014, Adidas NA was losing market share, with a capable but dispirited Management Team and approximately 3,500 employees

 

The challenge

Develop and implement a growth strategy in months, not years.

 

Solution

A 10-week initiative, teaching employees how to think like game changers and inviting them to help shape the company strategy.

  • Weeks 1 and 2 Participants go through the Adidas Innovation Academy to unlearn incremental thinking.

  • Weeks 3-6: Participants are challenged to come up with fresh insights and post them on a shared platform. Some challenged the existing strategy, others highlighted trends that weren't yet on the company's radar.

  • Weeks 7-10: Participants turn insights into business ideas.


Result

Approximately 1000 ideas were peer-rated for impact and doability. While the ideation process placed no constraints on the sort of ideas, most ended up clustering around a dozen or so strategic themes. During an all-hands ‘shark tank’, key proposals were pitched; several were fast-tracked.


 

“This process fostered a culture of curiosity and moved us more towards thinking and challenging. You can get compliance top-down, but you can’t get commitment top-down” 


Mark King, CEO Adidas North America, 2014 – 2018

  

 

STEP 3

Design and initiate the process, considering the degree of AI support you use

  1. If you decide not to go for a company-wide conversation, then here are some ways to somewhat open the strategy process:

    1. Ensure every future-focused meeting includes a disproportionate number of young people, newcomers, and individuals who have worked in other industries. For example, present plans before hundreds of young employees who live-tweet/comment criticisms and suggestions.

    2. Make outsiders feel like insiders. Build an open discovery network, invite customers, suppliers, and industry experts, and host a conversation about the future and ask, “What do you think we should start/stop/keep doing?”

    3. Install a council ('headlight team'), whose members spend time with customers, employees, and check out competitors, extracting insights and ideas to fuel their strategic thinking.

  2. If you opt for a company-wide conversation:

    1. Invest in building creative skills, training people to think differently to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

    2. Make it social. The magic happens when ideas collide, and curious people interact on an online strategy platform, enabling innovators to find colleagues working on similar ideas and then collaborate if they choose to.

    3. Buy or build the online strategy platform, e.g., MS Teams, Miro, Circlelytics.

  3. Determine process and formats:

    1. Design the appropriate process, for example: (i) the new council meets weekly to identify key strategic themes to be addressed, (ii) launch an employee survey (start/stop/keep), (iii) ask the top-50 for their 3 key constraints that must be tackled, (iv) decide on a 2-day offsite or a series of executive dialogues, e.g., (i) current state including goals & boundaries, (ii) future environment, (iii) future desired state, (iv) walk-back requirements, and (v) implementation plan moving forward.

    2. Define the structure and granularity of the strategy template; take, for example, the One Page Strategic Plan, which captures the Vision and Values, BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), the Where, the What (objectives for the next 12 months), and the How (90-day priority), the next quarter's theme & celebration, etc.

    3. Eventually, guide the process and consolidate inputs in such a way that the classic sections are covered; the current situation, the future environment and desired state, the walk-back in terms of required initiatives, and the plan forward including financial and operational implications. Ensure execution by embedding new routines such as the quarterly adjustment of the One Page Strategic Plan (or OKR, OGSM, etc.) for departments and individuals.

  4. Integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the strategic development continuum, ranging from AI-assisted to AI-driven methods.

    1. AI-assisted: In this model, generative AI is leveraged to categorize and synthesize inputs during various stages of idea generation, similar to the approach in the Adidas Open Strategy initiative. Generative AI excels at processing and structuring textual data. It can automatically parse submissions, remove redundancies, highlight the most commonly addressed points, and propose questions that prompt further refinement and enhancement of ideas and strategies. This capability transforms the traditionally labor-intensive task of evaluating inputs, such as those from employee feedback surveys, into a more efficient, AI-mediated process.

    2. AI-enhanced: AI examines the depth, completeness, and coherence of ideas by contrasting them with established strategy frameworks and benchmarks. It then provides constructive feedback, offering suggestions for augmentation or modification.

    3. AI-supported: AI is utilized to formulate components of the strategy or certain aspects of the developmental phase. For instance, our experiences with creating consumer personas and identifying their unmet needs—functional, emotional, and social—have been highly positive. The accuracy, comprehensiveness, and speed of GPT's output have been a valuable preliminary step before consumer validation, saving us several weeks of consumer interviews. In the case of a fashion brand, we used AI to conceive product concepts addressing these needs and to visualize these ideas promptly, enabling immediate consumer response. The AI demonstrated creativity in generating relevant concepts and the ability to quickly depict them in realistic scenarios, greatly aiding consumer evaluation and market testing.

    4. AI-driven: An experiment at INSEAD took this approach to a new level: A classroom study contrasted a strategy formulated by MBA students through traditional methods with one crafted using a virtual AI assistant. This assistant was an interactive tool that combined the "Blue Ocean" strategic framework with the generative capabilities of Chat GPT. The outcomes of both processes were comparable, with the AI-derived strategy being notably more innovative in some aspects. The most striking contrast was the time investment: students spent a week, whereas the AI required merely an hour. For a detailed account of the INSEAD experiment, refer to the Harvard Business Review article: Can GenAI Do Strategy?

 

Sources: IntotheNXT.com; ‘Scaling up’ by Verne Harnish; ‘Humanocracy’ by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini; HBR ‘Can GenAI Do Strategy?’ by Michael Olenick and Peter Zemsky

 

IntotheNXT

IntotheNXT is a strategy consultancy that unlocks growth potential. Our approach is people-first, driven by unconventional thinking, and action-oriented. If you’re seeking better strategy and execution for disruptive technologies, improved commercial performance, or culture transformation, reach out to us. C-level coaches and thinkers and doers for effective execution. Our goal: transform 25 companies by 2050.

 

About the author

Bas Kemme has 20+ years of experience as a top-tier strategy & innovation consultant and start-up founder. During his start-up time he became inspired to bring the start-up spirit back to corporates and went through several learning journeys since then, related to innovation, human motivation and organization models. Bas helps organizations serve customers better and be a great place to work through better application of human and artificial intelligence. In his works he applies leading thinking on strategy, innovation, leadership, and organization psychology.  

Email: Bas.kemme@intothenxt.com                



 





31 views0 comments


My good friend, Marketing Director at a global consumer brand asks me casually. A simple question, which begs for a solid answer. Because it is so fundamental if you want to build a truly progressive company. Customer-centricity, I reflect, is similar to Big Data and the other buzz words and teenage sex (everybody talks about it, few really know how to do it, etc etc). 

I know the answer is in Clayton Christensen’s 'Competing Against Luck', the book about what causes growth and how to create it. For a while I want to summarize and share, and Clay's passing away triggers me to do it. So here, a stab at passing on his learnings, borrowing many of his phrases. But first, a few words on the WHY and WHAT.


Let's be brief about the WHY. 

It is to see something others have missed, and then run your company to nail fulfilling that need. Avoid competition. Or, be damned hard to copy, as you create the experiences that customers seek purchasing and using the product or service, then deliver through reliable processes every time, better than others. That is competitive advantage, hard to copy. Why Uber won, and former competitor Taxi Magic's founder starts his keynote speech with:

"I could have been a billionaire".

Let's leave it at that. 

OK, more on the WHY, as corporate performance will be so much better, because you will:


  • Inspire employees as they see how their work enables real people to make real progress in their lives

  • Enable fast, distributed decision-making (problem solving, customer service)

  • Align resources against what matters most and free resources for what does not

  • Stop conflicting arguments, as 'what customers hire the company to do' will always be common ground for opposing teams


No need to debate the WHAT either.

Jeff Bezos talks in his famous 2016 shareholder letter about 'True Customer Obsession'. So does the rest of us. The word 'customer-centric' can be found in almost any strategy paper or annual report we come across (just as 'innovation', 'disrupt', 'digital transformation',  soon replaced by 'AI' and 'Carbon Neutral'). But there is also nuance. The founder of one other of the '4 trillion-dollar club' vowed against customer research (you know who). So did Sony's Akio Morita in another decade, when overruling market research against the Walkman. For a good reason, as Scott Anthony, Christensen's life-long colleague and friend points out: 

"The customer deceives. Existing customers often serve as poor guides to the future, as they tell companies to provide them better, cheaper versions of what they currently providing"

 SO REALLY, HOW? 

There are 3 essential steps becoming a truly customer-centric organization. Each with concrete actions. Not an overnight feat, but a do-able transformational journey.


Step 1: Uncover and bring to life the most important customer 'jobs to be done' your organization exists to solve. Then, create the desired experiences 


The customer ‘job to be done’, is the progress the customer is struggling to achieve in a particular circumstance. "Help me to quickly and conveniently serve high-quality coffee @home and impress my friends", something which was hard, perhaps impossible, before Nespresso. It forces to think in problems to solve, not products. Introducing jobs to be done as a common language will help people understand what causes the consumer (B2C), or customer (B2B) to 'hire' your company's product or service.




Airbnb for example uncovered the job of "having a place to stay allows customers to be someplace so they can participate in something in which they want to be part —and offer a more authentic local experience". Then, the company identified and storyboarded 45 emotional moments for hosts and guests.

Understanding the job will not only help you decide what should be in / out the product or service, it will also help you to communicate in the customers' language, not jargon (remember iPod's 1000 songs in your pocket?), and help you find new sales channels.

Sounds easy, yet you will stumble upon a skill that is rare at corporates (which is one key reason why corporates 'get disrupted'). Having worked with the world's largest consumer goods companies, banks, and chemical companies, I noticed that many do not have an overview of customer jobs ready, prioritized, and fully understood in terms of circumstances of the struggle, the barriers, alternatives (not just direct competitors!) and what defines performance choosing one over the other. Running an ideation session for new propositions, or validate new products, will feel like pulling teeth. During one such session I facilitated, the team brought in a new drinks device. With huge potential, IF we were to apply it to the right unmet customer job to be done. Unfortunately, the team did not let go of the internal job of increasing on-the-go consumption, thereby excluding interesting unmet customer jobs in for example home or bar circumstances. Institutionalized is the use of (quantified) market research, asking 'what customers want', whereas it should be known by now that customers cannot articulate what caused them to buy something. This 'detective' skill, of investigating, piecing together a complicated story, with all its emotional richness, is often absent. When sharing my frustration after one of those pulling teeth sessions with this FMCG’s Innovation Leader, he readily acknowledged

"Our marketeers have forgotten how to do real marketing"

So, take the following 5 actions to identify and live key customer jobs:




Revamp your consumer insight by training or hiring people with jobs to be done methods (see the Milkshake story, and http://jobstobedone.org). Then, review your current research with a job to be done lens, after which, go out, investigate, and develop an even richer 'job spec' which make you understand, fundamentally, what causes customers to buy your product (or not). This is a tedious, but hugely rewarding activity, the key to all the benefits described above

  1. Define the corresponding experiences (customer journeys), addressing the pains & gains and the forces compelling & opposing the customer's change to the new solution

  2. Consistently communicate the most important customer jobs, and lead by example. When engaging with customers and employees, ask the questions to continuously uncover the full customer job spec and corresponding experiences

  3. Bring to life the jobs and journeys in office (think of the Airbnb storyboards, customer stories, etc.) and conduct sessions to ensure key jobs are broadly understood

  4. Adjust your (unit's) mission statement, internal & external communications to ensure the customer job is included


Step 2: Maintain your organization structure, but re-shape your processes and KPIs to fulfil the customer experience and nail the job  


The good news: You will not need a large-scale reorg, as traditional structures, your silos, do have value. So avoid the org chart trap of spending countless debates and 6-figure consulting fees of re-drawing boxes and lines. What matters most is processes: How different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the experience which nails the customer jobs to be done. Moreover, what get measured gets done, use KPIs that matter for the customer. "We always start with the customer and look at all the metrics that matter for the customer", says Amazon's VP of International Retail Diego Piacentini. Finally, as lubricant to the processes, adjust your culture, using symbols and behaviour to promote desired behaviours.





At C&A Brazil for example, where campaigns with Gisele Bündchen (Poderosas) ensure a #1 position in the Brazilian apparel market, a chair (or throne) for 'Ella' (her) is reserved at all cross-functional team tables. To remind we create an experience for her to be acknowledged, for the strong woman with economic power in Brazilian society that she is. 

So, take the following 3 actions to align your organization to the job:


  1. Set up and integrate the right processes, no need to change structure

  2. Adjust your process KPIs to measure what matters for the customer, as what gets measured gets done 

  3. Embed jobs centricity in your culture over time, actively changing highly visible symbols and behaviour


Step 3: Keep a clear eye on the job by changing business review meeting agendas and metrics input, avoid the 'data trap' 

Simon Sinek in ‘Start with Why’ points at a typical phenomenon in any large company. He calls it 'the split', when the organization veers off the Why, and starts to focus on the What.




The split is almost unavoidable. Once products are launched a faucet is opened with product, customer, financial and competitor data.  This data is loud. Managers feel an understandable sense of reassurance when they ship their attention from the hazy contours of a story of struggle (the customer job) to the to the crisp precision of a spreadsheet. That is where the attention goes, not the customer job. And then there is the problem that data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want to support. We all learn this at the first (or perhaps second) statistics course, yet goes neglected. The risk is only getting bigger with the rapidly increasing availability of transaction data from Direct-to-Consumer business and advanced BI systems.

Simon Sinek thus understandably advocates to create customer-job related data, by implementing metrics for progress against the company's mission, purpose or cause. To keep the eye on the job. Heidrick Consulting's Scott Snyder points at Waze for example:

"Waze gives people time back in their lives, it celebrates how well - roughly 60 hours per year per customer"

What you do want to do with the data, is to signal anomalies, in particular the positive ones, as a useful trigger point to start investigating what causes the unexpected. This will provide clues about different uses and therefore growth opportunities, as Peter Drucker famously mentioned "the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him”.

Besides the data risk, companies typically follow the path of least resistance to grow existing customers, solving a broader set of jobs. As opposed to staying focused on solving the core job better. This leaves them vulnerable to others who focus on a single job, and do it well. Rings a bell in any industry that is currently being disrupted, banking for example, anyone?

So 3 actions to take to keep a clear eye on the job in business reviews:


  • Redesign your typical business review meeting agendas, rebalancing the time spend between typical retro-active and forecast ‘business review’, and actively discovering and prioritizing ways to serve the customer jobs better (using data anomalies as a trigger point)

  • Change your KPIs & dashboards to balance data (qualitative and quantitative) between company performance and customer job fulfilment

  • Question (in strategy sessions) whether your company focuses enough on serving the single job better, as opposed to wrongfully pursuing (short-term) growth by fulfilling multiple jobs for existing customers


That’s it. A view on the HOW of customer-centricity. I am sure this can be sharpened further, for example with other excellent sources such as ‘ The Customer Centricity Playbook’ by Fader and Toms. As we are all in learning modus for the perfect answer in different circumstances, I welcome your feedback and stories to share! 

***

BUILDING TRULY PROGRESSIVE COMPANIES

My drive is to help leaders build truly progressive companies, as today, too many corporates and smaller companies are not, they stagnate. More positive impact on people, planet, profit is within our reach. The organizational and psychological paths of least resistance leading to stagnation, and ways to break these, are all codified yet not known enough. True progress will come from higher awareness, broader application.

(*) Progressive -- Cambridge English Dictionary

Adjective -- Progressive ideas or systems are new and modern, encouraging change in society or in the way that things are done

Noun -- Glasses with special lenses that let you see things clearly at different distances.



DISCLAIMER

The points in this article are drawn from ‘Competing against Luck’, by Clayton Christensen, and work by Peter Drucker and Simon Sinek, and personal experiences as an entrepreneur and consultant. They do not represent official viewpoints of the firm employing the author, neither does the author own any stocks or financial instruments of companies mentioned. 

8 views0 comments
Writer's picture: Bas KemmeBas Kemme


Ikea is no longer just a furniture company, according to fastcodesign.com. The company is partnering with Adidas, Lego, and Sonos to sell you everything.

Well, the latter point may be overstated, it did trigger a thought or two about SURVIVAL: RENEWAL is the key. Our human bodies survive through cell renewal. We as professionals survive by learning new skills, dropping the old. Companies survive, stay relevant by constantly renewing themselves, as Management guru Peter Drucker advocated, becoming "Greedy for new things", which includes a policy of systemic abandonment (which by the way, speaks for the much feared ZBB cost management, another topic).

A few weeks back at Transformamus, the Business Transformation conference in Zurich, Philipp Welte, Vorstand Hubert Burda Media, a successfully transforming print-to-digital media company, mentioned a seemingly arbitrary yet fundamental change in his working style. He adopted the standing table, to which he shared a quote not to forget:

“When man sitzt bleibt man stehen” (when you sit you stand still).

This reminded me of encountering Anders Dahlvig, former CEO of IKEA in his “office” in 2008 – at a standing table in the middle of the open office space. This company truly is different and DESIGNED TO SURVIVE

  1. Purpose-led: "To create a better everyday life for the many people"

  2. Consumer jobs to be done focused: The products above for example are meant “to make it even easier to throw an impromptu party.”

  3. Confident and driven to timely experiment to remain vital and relevant.


There is an increasing awareness of the code for being "designed to survive", well laid-out by Peter Drucker and later Clayton Christensen in their respective work. A number of founders create DNA similar to IKEA for when it will be no longer founder-led, and CEOs are increasingly readying their company for innovation at scale. Good times ahead!



11 views0 comments
bottom of page