Here’s one of the most popular and least effective management methods: a strategy template that starts with a company’s Vision and Mission and cascades down to Strategies and Objectives. This strategy template has many problems, such as not mentioning customers’ priorities or your competitive strengths (these should be foundational!). It often produces vague, generic results that avoid making difficult choices.
In a single day, Nike lost $24 billion in market value – an 18% decline in its stock price. What can we learn from such a spectacular failure by such a sterling brand?
25 years ago, I had the privilege of supporting Bain’s Fred Reichheld in researching one of his first books on loyalty. Fred would soon go on to invent the Net Promoter Score, but at this point he was still calculating the economics of customer loyalty. The math was quite compelling.
Clay Christensen taught me countless things, but there was one topic on which we always disagreed.
Imagine yourself in this situation: You sell a product that’s essentially identical to competitors’ offerings, at similar pricing. You have a massive core business serving a market that’s becoming gradually outmoded. What do you do to differentiate and grow?
