It's the responsibility of the CEO to spot the future strategies and tactical moves that are most likely to sustain and enhance advantage for his or her company. In this book, George Stalk, noted strategist with The Boston Consulting Group, reveals and details five strategies that he believes have significant potential, across a broad range of industries, to separate winners from losers—and that executives will ignore at their peril.
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George Stalk, author of the books Kaisha, Competing Against Time, Breaking Compromises, Perspectives on Strategy, and Hardball, keeps a set of "open files" on intriguing topics in strategy and operations. Over time, some fade in importance while others gather critical mass and gain in relevance.
For this book, George has pulled five strategies from his files that should be on the watch list of every CEO:
- Supply Chain Gymnastics. There's a ticking time bomb in most companies' globalized supply chains. It's the yawning gap between global demand for shipping and transit-related services—and the available and anticipated supply. Companies that design their strategies to accommodate, and even leverage, this reality can gain an unassailable advantage over rivals.
- Sidestepping Economies of Scale. The "disposable factory" is labor-intensive, capital-light, and offers high throughput at low cost—and it has been an engine of growth for many competitors from developing economies. The same principles may offer a way for more traditional companies to address the uncertainty inherent in today's shorter product and business-model life cycles.
- Dynamic Pricing. In many sectors it is now possible to maximize profits by matching pricing to immediate second-by-second demand. And first movers can gain a critical information advantage that's hard to neutralize.
- Embracing Complexity. Complexity is not always a bad thing. Yes, it can add costs, but when it gives you the edge with the most profitable customers, the return on intelligent complexity can be enormous.
- Infinite Bandwidth. The day is coming when bandwidth will no longer be a constraint and businesses will have instantaneous access to any information they need, anywhere they need it, at essentially zero cost. It's not too early to position yourself to seize the advantage this represents for enhanced operational efficiency, new business models, and as yet unimagined businesses.
Don't say you haven't been warned.
Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now is the inaugural title in the new "Memo to the CEO" series from Harvard Business School Press. The series is intended to offer critical executive perspectives on a range of key CEO issues in a short format ideal for consideration on one long-haul plane flight.
- Introduction: The Five Strategies
- Supply Chain Gymnastics
- Sidestepping Economies of Scale
- Dynamic Pricing
- Embracing Complexity
- Infinite Bandwidth
- Conclusion: The Longer Term
George Stalk, Jr.
George Stalk's practice is focused on creating unassailable competitive advantage. He has consulted to a wide variety of companies throughout the world. Along the way, George worked and lived for more than a decade in Japan, where he first revealed time to be a source of Japanese competitive advantage. To demonstrate the reproducibility of the Japanese strategy, George ran a client's factory in North America: costs were reduced and quality significantly improved, while throughput times were cut by a factor of ten. At BCG, these efforts led to the creation of a practice focused on time-based competition and reengineering for speed as well as costs.
From 1998 to 2003, George led BCG's worldwide innovation efforts, managing initiatives that focused on almost all aspects of growth, e-commerce strategy, pricing innovation, and identification and exploitation of strategic discontinuities.
George co-wrote the best-selling books Competing Against Time and Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation. His articles have appeared in many business publications, including Harvard Business Review, where one of his articles won the McKinsey Award for best of the year. He was identified as one in a new generation of leading management gurus by BusinessWeek and as one of the top ten consultants in the world by Consulting Magazine.
George holds a B.S. in engineering mechanics from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
John Butman
John Butman is the author, editor, or collaborating writer of more than fifteen books. With BCG, he collaborated with Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske on Trading Up, the BusinessWeek bestseller and Berry-AMA Book Prize winner; with George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer on Hardball; and with Hal Sirkin, James Hemerling, and Arindam Bhattacharya on Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything. In addition to his nonfiction works, which explore issues of business management and social change, he has published two novels, a personal narrative, poetry, and numerous articles.
Before focusing exclusively on books, John spent twenty years as a communications consultant for clients around the world. He has helped corporations, private companies, educational institutions, and government agencies articulate messages, develop communications programs, and create media materials of all kinds; his work has won more than 50 awards and citations. John is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
