Business Architect

Strategic Thinking

 

Outside-In Company

Discover Growth Opportunities by Looking at Your Business from the Customer's Perspective

 

Sustainable Growth

Search for Opportunities

 

"Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction." ~ Kenichi Ohmae

 

Looking From Outside In

By Masaaki Imai2

Understand what's going in the real world – ask these searching questions relentlessly:

❶  What's happening in your marketplace?

❷  How the needs are changing?

❸  What's causing the changes?

❹  Where are the resulting opportunities?

 

 

Having answered the above questions, work backward:

❶  What needs do you satisfy now?

❷  What need could you satisfy now? In future?

❸  What's the gap between them and what you do now, and how to bridge it?

❹  What advantages and internal capabilities do you have? What advantages and capabilities do you need to create?

❺  What old competencies do you need to deemphasize?

 

 

Creating Sustainable Profits: 9 Questions To Answer

Value Innovation: Yin-Yang Strategies Download PowerPoint presentation, pdf e-book

3 Strategies of Market Leaders Download PowerPoint presentation, pdf e-book

Developing Sustainable Growth Strategy From the Outside In

The real world strategic thinking is both imaginative and highly disciplined. Outside-in thinking can transform businesses that are "commoditized", "mature" or otherwise supposedly without growth prospects.

7 Routes to High Profits

Customer Care

Surprise To Win

In the outside-in company, as opposed to inside-out one, the key word is need, not product. Their people think expansively. They observe people, "they're totally immersed in the minds of their customers, looking for ways to expand demand. Their business plans and value propositions derive from the marketplace, based on the knowledge gathered at ground level. Often, the needs they define haven't yet been identified by the customers themselves."1

A sustainable growth strategy of an outside-in company "starts with understanding the difference between what you make and what people need – which often turns out not to be the same thing. Tapping your resources of energy and imagination, you look at your company from the perspective of your once and future customers, and asking endless questions about what's going on in the real world."1 Having stepped outside of your business, then work backward to ask questions about your business to find out how you can pursue the market opportunities identified... More

Create Customer Value: 10 Lessons from Konosuke Matsushita

Dynamic Business Models

Today, Business Models Download PowerPoint presentation, pdf e-book have shorter shelf life. Customer loyalty is fading.  You must keep reinventing the ways of creating customers. You must constantly reassess your past decisions and attempt to discover, create and  implement new business models and dynamic strategies if you hope to survive and grow... More

Learning SWOT Questions

 

Jack Welch's 5 Strategic Questions

Case Studies 3M

Ram Charan and Noel Trichy1 in their book Every Business Is a Growth Business write: "Many companies have seemingly done well thinking from the inside out. 3M achieved legendary success as an innovator by giving its people room to develop their ideas in quasi-entrepreneurial fashion. For years, it ranked among the leaders of FORTUNE's list of most admired companies. But during the first half of the 90s, 3M grew its top line less than 4% despite the brilliance of its entrepreneurial technologists. There wasn't enough feedback from the marketplace – missing were the insight into the customer's mind, and the intuitive observations about needs that could have translated inventiveness into powerful growth." In late 90s, new leadership got the company back on track with outside-in growth initiatives.

 

 

References:

1. Every Business is a Growth Business, Ram Charan and Noel. M. Tichy Jennings and

2. Kaizen: The Key To Japan's Competitive Success, Masaaki Imai