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How Strategic Imagination Happens - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org - 0 views

discussionleader.hbsp.com/...ategic_imagination_happ_1.html

strategic Imagination harvardbusiness.org harvardbusiness hbr umair

shared by raheel naqvi on 26 Jan 09 - Cached
  • How Strategic Imagination Happens
  • That's this: thinking differently about strategy is impossible - or, perhaps worse, that it's naïve.
  • Let's take a second to explore.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Strategy isn't written in stone. Rather strategy is built upon a given set of economics - at the simplest level, a set of payoffs.
  • Today's economics are in shock - numerous shocks are rolling across the global economic landscape.
  • As economics changes, so must strategy. What was "strategic" yesterday is less and less strategic today.
  • And that requires us to have strategic imagination: to be able to imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.
  • Now, that's hard work. Very few companies are able to tap - let alone master - strategic imagination.
  • Why not? Strategic imagination is tremendously difficult because it requires us to put aside yesterday's tired assumptions and orthodoxies, and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created.
  • The surest, most lethal killer of strategic imagination is being reined in by orthodoxy: thinking that tomorrow must be like yesterday.
  • Here are a few examples of strategic imagination:
  • It was naïve for Apple to think that it could make a better mobile phone from scratch - and that a simple phone could redesign the rotting mobile value chain - or so Nokia and Sony Ericsson thought. It was naïve for Tata to believe that a car affordable for the world's poor could ever be designed, let alone produced - or so Detroit thought. It was naïve for Google to focus on doing no evil before focusing on revenue and profitability - or so Big Media thought. It was naïve for P&G to open up, and explore radical new modes of interaction, instead of pursuing orthodox advantage by staying closed - or so Wal-Mart thought. It was naïve for H&M and Zara to imagine that cheap clothes could be hyperfashionable - more fashionable than couture - or so the Gap thought. What do these examples have in common? They're examples of strategic imagination that required firms to be naïve: to start from scratch, to see, in Technicolor, a better world not constrained by today's stifling and suffocating status quo. Ratan Tata, in the article above, talks about a "leap of faith". That's the next stage of strategic imagination: being able to see and then believe in a vastly different, radically better future - and not being limited to seeing and believing in a grainy, washed-out future that seems depressingly inevitable.
  • But taking leaps of faith is exactly what orthodox firms are built not to do.
  • The edgeconomy demands firms explode their capacity for strategic imagination.
  • That's why only a single player on that list is an orthodox incumbent - P&G: the rest are new entrants, or lateral entrants.
  • Another example. I've been talking about artificial scarcity quite a bit. Here's JP Rangaswami discussing responding to artificial scarcity with artificial abundance. Now that's the beginnings of strategic imagination.
  • Edge strategy isn't for incrementalists. Those who think games built for an industrial era are still the only ones worth playing need not apply.
  • Rather, it takes a profound appetite for revolution: a profound ability to let go of yesterday's stale, tired, and thoroughly toxic orthodoxies - to explode the shrunken, stunted strategic imagination the industrial-era firm suffers from.
raheel naqvi

Facebook's Profound Strategic Error - Harvard Business Online's Umair Haque - 0 views

discussionleader.hbsp.com/...0bitscom20080506thestateo.html

church firm presentation press printing umair

shared by raheel naqvi on 08 May 08 - Cached
  • I think that just like the invention of the printing press hastened the decline of church power, the invention of the corporation hastened the decline of government power, the Internet will probably hasten the decline of corporate power.
raheel naqvi

Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...nterprise_20_pricing_model.php

enterprise 2.0 readwriteweb business model discussion bmi

shared by raheel naqvi on 25 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model
  • Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes. Pricing Tied to Volume Enterprise social computing offerings -- such as social networks or the numerous Twitter-for-the-enterprise applications that currently abound -- generally don't have complex pricing structures. They are volume-discount based: that is, the more accounts customers buy, and the more employees who use them, the larger the discount vendors give them, and the lower their average price per user will be. Some vendors advertise flat pricing schemes, but when a customer is big enough, a volume-discount deal inevitably creeps in. Value and Cost Out of Balance
  • Volume-discount pricing structures are simple, tried, and true. So, why aren't they efficient? The reason is because of where returns on investment (ROIs) are located. Enterprise social computing offerings provide increasing marginal productivity as they scale, at both the individual and organizational level. The more that employees use a service, the higher the margin gained by their company in productivity, and the more the company extracts value from the product. A corporate customer that has 10% of its employees using a Twitter-like product won't extract as much value as one that has 50% of its employees using it.
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  • Increasing returns to scale can come in different ways: positive network effect, viral economies of scale, distributed economies of scale, etc. All enterprise services offer some of these dynamics (or at least the simple network effect), and the better designed the product, the bigger these economies of scale. (Download this PowerPoint presentation of Umair Haque's work for more on the subject.)
raheel naqvi

NESTA Connect: Webank | Are people replacing institutions? - 0 views

blogs.nesta.org.uk/...le-replacing-institutions.html

webank bank2.0 finance2.0 uymair nesta

shared by raheel naqvi on 20 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Webank | Are people replacing institutions?
  • Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?
  • While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether.   Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Following NESTA's publication last month's of Attacking the Recession, Christian Alhert at Open Business and I are convening this event to explore the trends, opportunities and risks that these new web-enabled approaches provide. 
  • webank is on Wednesday 21st January at NESTA HQ and will be an unique opportunity to meet the companies pioneering in this area, explore their business models and debate the opportunities and issues this area faces.  The innovative companies presenting on the night will include Zopa, Kubera Money and Midpoint with debate speakers including Giles Andrews (MD, Zopa UK), James Gardner (Bankervision) and Umair Haque (Havas Media Lab). 
  • And from everyone at NESTA Connect...we wish you all the happiest of holidays!
raheel naqvi

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab - 0 views

www.bubblegeneration.com/?a=a&resource=musicrisk1

bubblegeneration umair music music2.0

shared by raheel naqvi on 29 Jan 09 - Cached
  • The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard Part 1: Why the Music Industry is (Really) Broken ‘The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing’ – Cory Doctorow Every major label 's setting up an iTunes these days. They're all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, 'born to lose, and destined to fail'. Why? The music industry doesn't understand the microeconomics of it's own business. If it did, it would see that it's business model is not just misguided, but broken- because, DRM or not, the implicit contract it signs with listeners is being broken in both directions. I reached this conclusion because, as I was scoping BoingBoing one day, I read Cory's statement, and it struck me as exactly right. For many people, digital music's more about risk than it is about music itself. Not legal risk - but transactional risk, the kind of risk you take when you buy a used car. Now, this statement has deep economic meaning. I'd like to explain why.
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