Strategy
on Web 2.0
The corporation is going through the biggest change in many decades—maybe the biggest change ever.
So begins Don Tapscott’s interview with the The Globe and Mail’s Sean Wise about Web 2.0, one of the key new factors driving this change. A little farther on, Don offers a great definition of Web 2.0:
The old web was: low speed, accessible through a PC only, text and graphics-oriented, and based on HTML — a standard for the presentation of information. The new web is: broadband, accessible through billions of objects in the world from Blackberries and Treos to Refrigerators, embraces true multi-media and is geospatial — meaning that you can browse the physical world with Gypsy Tour for example, a product that tells you what's happening near you — wherever you are. Most importantly, the new web is based on XML, which is a standard, not for presentation but for computation. That means the web is becoming a giant global computer that everyone programs. So, each time you put a photo onto Flickr, enter something in a blog, or create or do something on [the virtual world] Second Life, you are, in a sense, programming a global computer.
Robert Kaplan How to Implement a New Strategy Without Disrupting Your Organization 
The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most effective tools ever developed for managing business strategy. Its creator Robert S. Kaplan
has written and co-written four books and dozens of articles detailing how to use the BSC to best effect. Here’s an introduction to one of them, How to Implement a New Strategy Without Disrupting Your Organization:
Article Description: Throughout most of modern business history, corporations have attempted to unlock value by matching their structures to their strategies: Centralization by function. Decentralization by product category or geographic region. Matrix organizations that attempt both at once. Virtual organizations. Networked organizations. Velcro organizations. But none of these approaches has worked very well. Restructuring churn is expensive, and new structures often create new organizational problems that are as troublesome as the ones they try to solve. It takes time for employees to adapt to them, they create legacy systems that refuse to die, and a great deal of tacit knowledge gets lost in the process. Given the costs and difficulties involved in finding structural ways to unlock value, it's fair to raise the question: Is structural change the right tool for the job? The answer is usually no, Kaplan and Norton contend. It's far less disruptive to choose an organizational design that works without major conflicts and then design a customized strategic system to align that structure to the strategy. A management system based on the balanced scorecard framework is the best way to align strategy and structure, the authors suggest. Managers can use the tools of the framework to drive their unit's performance: strategy maps to define and communicate the company's value proposition and the scorecard to implement and monitor the strategy. In this article, the originators of the balanced scorecard describe how two hugely different organizations—DuPont and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—used corporate scorecards and strategy maps organized around strategic themes to realize the enormous value that their portfolios of assets, people, and skills represented. As a result, they did not have to endure a painful series of changes that simply replaced one rigid structure with another. Order this article from Harvard Business Review. |
George Westerman The Incumbent’s Advantage Competition is a marathon, not a sprint. 
Many people talk about major strategic innovation as if they’re short-term games. If a firm gets a fast start and achieves rapid time to market, it’s bound to win the race. Unfortunately, competition is a marathon, not a sprint. Like the fabled Tortoise and the Hare, the fast-moving early leader often runs out of steam later. Winning at innovation means more than starting fast. It means choosing the right strategy for the whole race—both the early and late stages—in order to lead the pack at the end.
The most fundamental strategic decision in responding to a potential disruptive innovation is structuring the relationship between the innovating team and the rest of the firm’s capabilities. . . We find that there are three viable approaches to adopting a potentially disruptive innovation . . . |