Strategy – Stephen Shu, PhD

March 18, 2011

Business Development Chronicles – The Story of Us (Doesn’t Have to End in Tragedy)

It’s a tale of Big Company and Small Company.

Big Company likes Small Company’s:

focus and style
entrepreneurial attitude and skills.

Small Company likes Big Company’s:

scale of resources
scope and number of customers.

Big Company hates thing like:

getting embarrassed by Small Company in front of customers
getting burned and stuck with Small Company’s software source code
worrying about loose cannons in Small Company’s organization
working with Small Company’s legal paper.

Small Company hates things like:

working with Big Company’s cumbersome processes
getting whipped round navigating Big Company’s large organization and jumping through hoops
waiting for the whale to speed up
failing to get real deals cut
getting RFIs from Big Company and worrying whether Big Company is playing around with others
answering the RFI question about financial stability of Small Company
getting paid six months late by Big Company.

The Story of Us doesn’t have to end in tragedy. “Us” requires hard work, like courtship. It requires an honest assessment of values and one another’s strengths and weaknesses. It requires regular communication. It requires bridge building skills on fluctuating ground, and should be viewed as an opportunity for those up to the challenge.

Endnotes:

Business Development is about new initiatives and incubation
The percentage of alliance failures cited often exceeds 60 percent (example Entrepreneur article).
The title for this post was inspired by Taylor Swift’s song, The Story of Us from the Speak Now album
I wrote this post reflecting upon doing consulting & contract business development activities and representing mega, mid-market, and small companies over the past year.

August 11, 2010October 2, 2010

A Peek At The Difficulties of Incubating New Initiatives Within Large Companies

Entrepreneurial situations in large companies differ from that of startups, yet one thing that they seem to share is that they often represent “hope” in one way or another. In the case of large corporations, these new initiatives can not only turn out to be profitable “ventures” but also boost morale and reward key employees through growth opportunities. Yet many of these new initiatives have difficulty getting off the ground. Frustration is common. This post provides a peek at some of the situations, complexities, and steps to resolution that I have seen.

First, here’s a picture of a common situation in a large company faced with the prospect of starting a new initiative or business line:

Perceivably significant yet amorphous business opportunity
No money committed / no budget
No or limited organizational resources
Established products and sales & marketing channels
Mature and complex business and product approval processes.

What adds a level of complexity to the situation (and sometimes leads to insanity for those working directly within the environment) is that:

Venture requires substantial investment to ultimately succeed
Finance cycle of start-up opportunities (opportunity timing) does not align well with the long, finance planning cycles of large companies (sometimes can be 14+ month delays!)
Star players in the current organization have limited availability for the new organization
Articulating and aligning on a business opportunity requires collaboration by many functions, and these functions are separate and overloaded in the current organization
Sales and product development processes often need to be understood at more than the surface-level.

Here are some ideas for addressing many of the above issues:

Recognize that it’s not usually possible or desirable to speed up the process by cutting corners
Break the process into smaller pieces to get rolling
Search for the right sponsor and core team
Secure a portion of time for each of the star players
Give the employees a real chance to make things work
Consider getting a commitment for small amount of money to get rolling
Start to articulate what the business opportunity looks like and document it
Consider using a facilitator that can pull the pieces together, help layout program plan, and frame strategic issues and options
Paint the vision for the org structure and build emotional attachment to the cause
Involve those from sales and product development that will be eager to provide input and testing grounds
Aim for pioneer sales and business development deals with lighthouse accounts (concrete wins)
Rinse, refine, increase committment, and repeat.

It may take a leap of faith to get things started. But the leap of faith can be smaller than the temptation of the opportunity as a whole. Sometimes the keys are to look for forward motion and to take some initial steps as opposed to wanting to knock it out of the park too soon.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

April 12, 2010October 2, 2010

How To Help Ensure Strategy Scorecards Don’t Fail You

For many strategy engagements, a lot of attention is paid to the detailed analysis framework. For example, should a benchmarking framework be used? Or will that framework lead us down a path of mediocrity? Or perhaps value-chain or Blue Ocean-like analysis should be used here? What method should we use for prioritizing brand associations and rectifying brand image versus identity? Regardless of strategy technique, one key output of these efforts is often a scorecard summary. A scorecard is tangible. It can be like a report card that you got from school in elementary school. While the scorecard is important, it’s important to not lose sight of how a scorecard is developed and what the scorecard could mean for your organization.

The figure below shows an illustrative scorecard for a company. The scorecard helps to identify strengths and weaknesses. In the scorecard below, I’ve also depicted areas where the company needs to make improvements (operational and tactical focus) and where the company needs to differentiate longer-term (strategic focus).

Traps with scorecards can happen with the processes before, during, and after the scorecard.

Common traps that can occur before the scorecard are:

Failing to craft the problem statement properly
Pursuing too narrow activities to solve the problem statement
Falling short on involving a broad part of the organization in the assessment & strategy development process
Getting the wrong mix of structured and unstructured methods
Using the wrong tools for the job
Having an inherently biased processes or failing to frame and address biases and limitations properly

Traps during the scorecard readout process include:

Being too negative and demotivating an organization
Not stepping back from the scorecard to look at the bigger picture
Failing to educate new audience members about the context of the scorecard and the prior processes used to arrive at the scorecard
Letting an organization rest on its laurels

(Very) common traps after the scorecard readout process include:

Failing to develop specific action plans
Not having a good follow-up and cadence for making progress

The picture below shows the logical context for an example scorecard process, and it is an important aspect often lost in the mix. Note that the process context for the scorecard is as important (if not more important) than the scorecard itself.

What are your experiences with scorecards? How can you use them more effectively?

April 2, 2010October 2, 2010

The Business Plan Is Alive And Well But It May Not Be What You Think

As many times I have written a “business plan”, it seems the flavor of it can vary quite substantially. I think the notion of this catches a good number of people by surprise. And why shouldn’t that be the case? Many textbooks and templates seem to cover business plan outlines with relatively similar structures. My suspicion is that the perspective that gets lost in the mix is intent. The intent of a business plan affects its format and content dramatically (more than outline). For this post, I thought it would be good to share some perspectives on why the process and plan should vary.

Business plan as a process – The process of vetting ideas, getting buy-in, and achieving alignment is most important in these situations. Example situations are new business launches in larger companies (e.g., intrapreneurship). Business plans can often take the form of workshop sessions and Powerpoint documents as opposed to a traditional textual Word document. See a popular post of mine, “In Consulting The Process Is An Essential Part Of The Deliverable“.

Business plan as a sales document – This situation is particularly appropriate for fund raising (e.g., angels, VCs). Key goals of the document are to establish trust with prospects, enable the investment idea to be shared via networks, and persuade people of the merits of an investment opportunity. Often need a mix of instruments here (Powerpoint & Word docs, napkin drawings, demo), depending on the team, industry, and phase of product development (e.g., technology feasibility, commercial feasibility, ramp-up).

Business plan as a hypothesis test or investigative framework – An entrepreneurial way of looking at a business plan is more as a framework or series of hypotheses tests. Questions may be: do customers really want product aspect A, do customers prefer this variation over that one, do customers perceive me as Y relative to my competitors, and will the dog eat the dog food? The business planning effort can be more organic than written and involve focus groups, customer prospect interviews, etc. But the framework process should be systematic in determining which hypotheses are true/false to prove out aspects the business over time.

Some other ways that come to mind are viewing the business plan as a communication tool, a dissertation (that must be closely inspected), debate tool, product development stage gate requirement, and RFP response requirement (e.g., for government grants).

How do you view you business planning efforts? To what extent could you benefit from new ways of thinking about them?

March 10, 2010

Using The “Seeding” And “Facilitating” Approach In Management Meetings And Consulting Engagements

One technique that I tend to use a lot in management meetings and consulting engagements involves the use of two slide types. The purpose of these slides is often to help the management team get aligned and make a critical decision about some set of issues.

The first slide I call the "Seeding" slide. The second slide I call the "Facilitating" slide.

The objectives of the "Seeding" slide are to articulate the general problem statement area and enable the management team to voice issues on specific areas within that vicinity. Note that in these situations, the exact problem statement may not be known or agreed upon. As such, it is often useful to research and include some frameworks or metaphors on the seeding slide that enable the management team to "warm up" and express issues from multiple perspectives.

The objectives of the "Facilitating" slide are to help the management team move forward and begin the dialogue of exploring potential solutions to the problem at hand. Is is often helpful to do some research on answers that can help seed the solution-exploration process. Research can take the form of best practices, case studies, academic solutions, etc. The meeting lead must work hard to apply their best facilitation skills on this slide – when to use open-ended questioning, when to analyze, and when to steer to closure require good judgment calls.

The pictures below are examples what "Seeding" and "Facilitating" slides might look like. The case below involves understanding and facilitating analysis of how two product development practices (within a merged software company) might be better integrated.

What challenges do have in facilitating management meetings and decision-making? How do you address such situations?

*********************************************************************************************************************

Please enter your email address to subscribe to updates on Steve Shu's blog. Thanks for subscribing!

February 18, 2010October 2, 2010

Using a “Frontier Chart” to Evaluate and Plan Project Portfolio Strategy

The introduction of new product or service lines into an existing customer base is a challenge that companies often face with new business development. Sometimes the opportunities can be readily quantified using traditional financial analysis (e.g., using net present value, scenario, and waterfall buildup methods). At other times, there may be hazards of trying to quantify an opportunity too early in the process before conceptual alignment of the stakeholders. For example, people can simply get stuck “in the weeds with the numbers”.

In this post, I share a method that I have sometimes found useful as a first step in framing and getting alignment among parties (especially when looking at new product development situations involving platforms upon which multiple products or product lines can be built). To be honest, I am not sure if there is a name for the type of chart I describe below, but I call it a “frontier chart” (which is derived from investment portfolio theory from finance).

The basic idea is that there are a set of lower risk projects out on the left side of the chart which have more known (potentially lower) expected returns. In contrast, projects on the right side might have higher risks but also higher, expected returns. So as an example of a project on the left side, a software company may have early customer engagements with a straightforward, add-on product that it directly developed (say a GPS mapping tool). As an example of a project on the right side, that same software company may be looking to introduce new platform capabilities such that indirect, 3rd parties can develop applications (e.g., Apple’s “there’s an app for that”). The later project venture is more risky, but the payoff could be larger than the former project.

A key benefit of using a frontier chart is that it can help to get buy-in on the high-level things and projects that people tend to agree with. There will be plenty of time later to put on our “propeller hats” and get bogged down in detailed numbers and execution tactics.

The ability to facilitate a company’s management team to move forward is priceless, and sometimes facilitation can be more difficult when introducing new products or services (which is outside of the core, day-to-day business). Consider using frontier charts and thinking about platform strategies (the latter which may be topic for another post).