Editor's note
Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey and Thomas Lawton, authors of the JBSpaper, “Vision by design: a reflexive approach to enterprise regeneration,”recently published their book, Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-digit Growth, from which the article is adapted. In an interview in the March 19, 2007 US News & World Report, Professor Finkelstein elaborated on breakout strategies:
It’s a growth strategy that pushes a company in new directions. There are big, established companies that have pursued breakout strategies, and there are some relatively young companies, like Google.
In their JBS paper, the authors focus on Harley-Davidson, the gold standard in motorcycles. But not too long ago, Harley was a laggard. “Most of the time, laggards will not recover. It’s very difficult for an existing management and culture to break out,” according to Professor Finkelstein. The authors describe exactly how Harley broke out of a losing syndrome in their JBS paper. As the Harley-Davidson case illustrates, a comprehensive,inclusive and dynamic vision can help lift an enterprise to a superior competitive position, avoiding in extremis the threat of corporate failure.
“Driving renewal: the entrepreneur-manager,” by Bala Chakravarthy and Peter Lorange is also adapted from a recent book, Profit or Growth: Why You Don’t Have to Choose, in which the authors provide tools and a framework for successfully sustaining profitable growth and focus on the execution of renewal strategies. Professors Chakravarthy and Lorange both teach and do research in strategy at IMD, a leading global business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
While Harley Davidson as a company may be thrilled to once again dominate its market, Eric Olson would undoubtedly wish Harley had a greater focus on the environment. An IBM executive who has written before for JBS, Mr Olson’s paper is about “Creating an enterprise-level ‘green’ strategy.”Many companies give lip service and a bit more to the importance of conserving the environment and resources but few have organization-wide strategies that guide their actions and decisions. This paper provides the tools for such a strategy as well as the rationale.
Laura Eselius and four of her colleagues at Deloitte have contributed a paper on the convergence of drugs, devices and diagnostics. These new partnerships,both from a technology and business perspective, are leading to innovative health care solutions and new opportunities for business growth and product differentiation in the life sciences industry. It is particularly challenging,though, to create partnerships that synchronize the goals, knowledge,capabilities and expectations of fundamentally different companies.
C. Brooke Dobni’s paper on the “The DNA of innovation” sounds as if it should be thematically connected to the life sciences paper, but it is actually about embedding core values in an organization at levels that reach deep into employee behavior.
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