Strategy Lab

To learn more about the art of adaptive advantage, read BCG's ebook on the topic—as well as the following articles: Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage, Signal Advantage, and People Advantage.

Organizations with explicit strategies for problem solving secure a competitive advantage that can be maintained long term.

Managers frequently face a difficult contradiction. They feel an immense pressure to cut costs and pursue efficiencies. At the same time, the increasing pace of change demands a focused emphasis on innovation. Resolving this contradiction in strategy requires ambidexterity—the ability to explore new avenues while exploiting existing ones.

Explore this interactive atlas, which provides a guide to the various strategy traps that firms encounter when balancing between exploration and exploitation. The atlas highlights both "sirens" (warning signs) and "lighthouses" (best practices).

In today’s increasingly turbulent business environment, many large companies could benefit from emulating mavericks—small outlier companies that think and act differently from incumbents.

The initial phase of transformation conserves and frees up resources. The next chapter in a successful transformation involves pivoting to growth and formulating a new strategy, vision, and business model that evolve through adaptive innovation.

BCG takes a fresh look at some of the firm’s classic thinking on strategy in order to explore its relevance in today’s business environment.