Is It Better to Be Strategic or Opportunistic? - Sarah Cliffe - Harvard Business Review - 0 views
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It’s trendy to say that sustainable competitive advantage is dead. Empirically, this is simply not true. Microsoft is in the supposedly volatile technology sector. They’ve missed almost every technological breakthrough of the past decade — and yet they earned $237 billion in operating income from 2001 to 2013 working off a strategy that was in place in the mid-1990s. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype. Sustainability still matters.
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Then there’s the horizons view – which is a very practical approach. It says that you focus some resources on sustaining your business, some on incremental change, and some on disruptive businesses. LEGO is a great example. The CEO has 100 people working on the core business, 20 or so on a slightly wider range of opportunities, and fewer than a dozen on innovations that could fundamentally disrupt the company’s business model.
