A New Context for Strategy

Dealing with multiple shifting paradigms calls for a whole new conceptual framework, a fresh approach to strategy defined in 21st-century terms. The nature of the strategic environment has changed; being successful in it will take different kinds of ideas from a different level of thinking.

But how does a new strategic theory translate to competitive advantage in the trenches, where the 'ground truth' of more sales and a higher share price and better quarterly results is the reality to confront?

Answering that big question can only come from a conversation that pushes the concept of creativity and the logic of leadership into an entirely new realm.

A New Context for Strategy.

Industry Implications

Pharmaceuticals:
'Pharmaceutical Promotion at Its Productivity Frontier. '
Despite spending somewhere between $30-60 billion annually in the United States on promotion, pharmaceutical market growth is at historical lows. Why?
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Marketing Services:
'Marketing Ecosystem Management'
Driven by the "urgent need to find new thinking" in cross-platform measurement and content delivery, executives from across the media, broadcast, and marketing services industries launched the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement in 2009. The problem they're trying to solve has less to do with measurement, however, than it has with linking the design of "creative" and performance metrics at the same time.
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Public Health:
'A System-Level View of Policy Shaping Prescription Assistance'
The complexity of the nonlinear gives the phrase "solving the problem" a hollow ring. In actuality, we "cope with environment."
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Your Operating Environment Has Changed. Radically.

Atomizing customer segments, accelerating social innovation, infinite media channels, an inexhaustible supply of data and information flowing freely around the world, the dissolution of boundaries and conventional notions of value, and the onward march of technological change have made strategic decision-making more complex, and less effective, for all industries.

This is what globalization really means: social, economic, and cultural processes are not impeded by geography or physical constraints, but cover the world as a single, interactive, simultaneous whole. Complexity increases. Diversity multiplies. Differentiation explodes. Power shifts. New subcultures self-generate. The number of alternative choices becomes endless. It becomes more difficult to analyze, model, predict or control.

And it is not only the environment that is becoming more complex; it is also "us". The number of tools, technologies, and functional specialties we can deploy makes it difficult to measure overall achievement for any endeavor. Fragmentation is getting worse, not better. The internet only adds to the layers of media as venues for communications. No media environment has retired because of obsolescence or irrelevance. Layers of complexity are being added, but none are being deleted. Culture is coming in shorter and shorter bits.

The traditional calculus is obsolete. All this economic and technological interconnectivity creates system effects. The challenge for leadership is to adapt to this new context for strategy.

Blogs We Follow

Rough Type Nicholas Carr's blog. His first book, "Does IT Matter?", punctured the view of information technology as a source of competitive advantage. His latest work, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", explores the intellectual and cultural consequences of the Internet.

Edge A group whose mission is "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."