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In their book Grow By Focusing on What Matters (© 2010 Business Expert Press), Professors Urbany and Davis start from the premise that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. Through nine chapters they explain how to build positioning using a "3-circle model" that facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing attention on the most critical strategy concepts in a demanding and uncertain competitive environment. Chapter 6 examines the growth strategies that evolve from the seven categories of value explained in Chapter 5. Topics include Value and Positioning, Growth Implications for Value, and Exploring Five Growth Imperatives. The book's outline: Chapter 1 The Challenges of Growth Chapter 2 Introduction to 3-Circle Analysis Chapter 3 Defining the Context Chapter 4 The Meaning of Value Chapter 5 Sorting Value Chapter 6 Growth Strategy Chapter 7 Implementation: An Inside View of the Organization Chapter 8 The Dynamics of Customer Value and Competitive Advantage Chapter 9 Summary: Growth Strategy in 10 Steps

In their book Grow By Focusing on What Matters (2010 Business Expert Press), Professors Urbany and Davis start from the premise that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. Through nine chapters they explain how to build positioning using a "3-circle model" that facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing attention on the most critical strategy concepts in a demanding and uncertain competitive environment. Chapter 7 examines issues of execution. The authors prod readers to consider their own organizations and products by asking "Do we have the skills and resources necessary to pursue these ideas" underlying the 3-circle model. A presentation on identifying and evaluating a firm's resources - financial, physical, human, technological, and reputational - leads to a discussion about applying those resources. Several case examples illuminate the chapter. The book's outline: Chapter 1 The Challenges of Growth Chapter 2 Introduction to 3-Circle Analysis Chapter 3 Defining the Context Chapter 4 The Meaning of Value Chapter 5 Sorting Value Chapter 6 Growth Strategy Chapter 7 Implementation: An Inside View of the Organization Chapter 8 The Dynamics of Customer Value and Competitive Advantage Chapter 9 Summary: Growth Strategy in 10 Steps

In their book Grow By Focusing on What Matters (© 2010 Business Expert Press), Professors Urbany and Davis start from the premise that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. Through nine chapters they explain how to build positioning using a "3-circle model" that facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing attention on the most critical strategy concepts in a demanding and uncertain competitive environment. Chapter 8 focuses on the dynamic aspects of markets. Market dynamics require a constant search for differentiation that can, paradoxically, lead to "sameness," as producers revise their products to neutralize the advantages of competing products. The authors explain how value moves through the 3-Circle model by demonstrating how markets and competitors change and how competitive advantage shifts over time. They also offer guidance on how to anticipate market changes. The book's outline: Chapter 1 The Challenges of Growth Chapter 2 Introduction to 3-Circle Analysis Chapter 3 Defining the Context Chapter 4 The Meaning of Value Chapter 5 Sorting Value Chapter 6 Growth Strategy Chapter 7 Implementation: An Inside View of the Organization Chapter 8 The Dynamics of Customer Value and Competitive Advantage Chapter 9 Summary: Growth Strategy in 10 Steps

In their book Grow By Focusing on What Matters (2010 Business Expert Press), Professors Urbany and Davis start from the premise that growth and competitive advantage are about effective positioning. Through nine chapters they explain how to build positioning using a "3-circle model" that facilitates speed of understanding and action by focusing attention on the most critical strategy concepts in a demanding and uncertain competitive environment. Chapter 9, the final chapter, summarizes the book by presenting the 10-step process in which a growth strategy project is defined and executed. There are really three big elements underlying these 10 steps. The first involves the management team formally laying out the scope of the project and then their hypotheses about customer value. The second involves gathering data directly from target customers and analyzing it by breaking it down into the categories defined in the 3-circle model and deeper analysis via laddering. The third involves developing particular growth strategy ideas and testing them via (a) an assessment of alignment and capabilities required and (b) an evaluation of the competitive dynamics of the marketplace. The book's outline: Chapter 1 The Challenges of Growth Chapter 2 Introduction to 3-Circle Analysis Chapter 3 Defining the Context Chapter 4 The Meaning of Value Chapter 5 Sorting Value Chapter 6 Growth Strategy Chapter 7 Implementation: An Inside View of the Organization Chapter 8 The Dynamics of Customer Value and Competitive Advantage Chapter 9 Summary: Growth Strategy in 10 Steps

Spreadsheet supplement to case UV0351.

By 2010, the National Football League (NFL) was still having trouble attracting both a global roster and fan base despite systemized attempts at internationalizing since 1989. Why? Was it simply a bad idea to try to export football, a sport that many considered uniquely American? Or was it a good idea that had been poorly executed?

In the past two decades, along with China's rapidly growing economy and its integration into the world economic system, the Chinese software outsourcing industry has also risen from zero to being fairly significant in the world IT market. It is currently growing much faster than the world market. Beyondsoft Co. Ltd., established in 1995, is a leading company in China's software outsourcing industry. This case poses challenges for future development, post the world financial turmoil of 2008-2009.

This case focuses on the competitive strategy of the number two management software company in China, Kingdee, as it competes with UFIDA and major international firms SAP and Oracle for position in the Chinese market. A particular focus is on its internal culture as it tries to grow rapidly with a very young non-Hokou-bearing staff in Shenzhen.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value -as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center -operationally optimized, "skills-routed,"managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. "We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books."They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn't quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new products and new technologies. But increasingly, innovation is seen as applying to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and routes to market, as well as new management practices. There is now a greater recognition that novel ideas can transform any part of the value chain -and that products and services represent just the tip of the innovation iceberg. This shift of focus has implications for who "owns"innovation. It used to be the preserve of a select band of employees -be they designers, engineers or scientists -whose responsibility it was to generate and pursue new ideas, often in a separate location. But increasingly, innovation has come to be seen as the responsibility of the entire organization. For many large companies, in fact, the new imperative is to view innovation as an "all the time, everywhere"capability that harnesses the skills and imagination of employees at all levels. Making innovation everyone's job is intuitively appealing but very hard to achieve, but many companies have tried -and nearly all believe that's it's critical to continue trying. To understand these challenges, and to identify the innovation practices that work, the authors spent three years studying the process of innovation in 13 global companies. Many of the standard arguments for how to encourage innovation in large organizations were confirmed, but some surprises were uncovered as well. In this article the authors focus on the key insights that emerged from their research, organized around five persistent "myths"that continue to haunt the innovation efforts of many companies. The five myths are: (1) The Eureka Moment; (2) Built It and They Will Come; (3) Open Innovation Is the Future; (4) Pay Is Paramount; and, (5) Bottom Up Innovation Is Best.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's second annual Sustainability & Innovation survey -exploring the current and projected sustainability-related practices of organizations and executives -was fielded during a year of bad public news for sustainability advocates. Between last year's much-publicized delay in reaching an international agreement on climate change in Copenhagen and the continuing economic malaise, it was hard to predict how sustainability would fare as a management priority. Would companies begin to scale back their efforts to adopt more efficient business practices and become less focused on sustainability-related issues? Would they put existing programs on hold? What assessments would they make about the implications for managers of the changing sustainability landscape, and how were their strategic plans for competing in the future being affected by sustainability concerns? This article is a first look at the results of the 2010 Sustainability & Innovation Executive Study -focusing especially on 12 top-line observations drawn from the survey data and separate in-depth executive interviews. The survey respondents included more than 3,107 managers and executives, representing every major industry and region of the world. This article offers answers to such questions as, Where does sustainability now fit on top management's agenda? Do top-performing companies see things differently? Who drives the agenda within companies? What does the C-suite think? And how do top managers go about making sustainability-related investment decisions when tangible information for weighing costs and benefits is often lacking?

In December 2010, one U.S. legislative action was largely overlooked in the popular press: the one-year extension of the 45-cent-per-gallon Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), commonly known as the "blender's credit." Both proponents and opponents of the blender's credit liked to cite data to support their positions. Proponents pointed out the number of jobs created by new ethanol plants, while opponents cited unfavorable energy balances from the use of ethanol and the overall budgetary impact of the blender's credit. What was less clear-but potentially much more important than the selective data cited by advocates and critics of ethanol-was the overall impact of the blender's credit on the U.S. economy. In particular, to what extent did the ethanol subsidy-by influencing the allocation of resources to the ethanol market-act as a drag on efficiency in the U.S. economy? This case presents a history of ethanol in the U.S. and an overview of the market for ethanol-based motor fuel, including data on demand and supply fundamentals. It also discusses the broader U.S. energy market, as well as the U.S. market for corn. The case reviews other policy interventions besides the ethanol tax credit that have an impact on the market for ethanol-based motor fuel, such as tariffs and mandates. Finally, it surveys the ways other countries around the world, such as Brazil, have supported the use of ethanol-based fuel.

The capitalist system is under siege. Recently business has been criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities. Trust in business has fallen, leading governments to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle. A big part of the problem is firms' narrow approach to value creation. Focused on short-term financials, companies overlook the broader influences on their long-term success. Why else would they ignore the well-being of their customers, the depletion of vital natural resources, the viability of suppliers, and the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell? It doesn't have to be this way. Companies could bring business and society back together if they redefined their purpose as creating "shared value"-generating economic value in a way that also produces value for society by addressing its challenges. Firms can do this in 3 ways: by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain, and building supportive industry clusters near their locations. A number of leading firms have already embarked on such initiatives. Nestle, for example, redesigned its coffee procurement, providing small, impoverished farmers advice on agricultural practices; helping them secure plant stock, fertilizers, and pesticides; and paying them a premium for better beans. Higher yields and quality increased the growers' incomes, the environmental impact of farms shrank, and Nestle's reliable supply of good coffee grew significantly. Shared value was created. Shared value could transform capitalism. It could also drive the next wave of innovation and growth as it opens managers' eyes to immense human needs to be met, large new markets to be served, and the internal costs of social deficits-as well as the competitive advantages available from addressing them.

Many Western multinationals expect to find most of their future growth in emerging economies. But they have frequently struggled to exploit the opportunity, relentlessly cutting costs and accepting profit margins close to zero. The problem, say the authors, who are all with the innovation consultancy Innosight, is not that these companies can't create viable offerings but that simply transplanting their domestic business models to the new markets won't work. They must devise fundamentally new models-by identifying an important unmet job consumers need to do; performing that job profitably at a price the customer will pay; and carefully implementing and evolving the model by constantly testing assumptions and making adjustments. Drawing on their experience investing in, incubating, and consulting for companies that have created 20 new business models in developing markets, the authors describe the vast potential demand represented by the "middle market" in emerging economies-the millions of people who have the desire and wherewithal to pay for goods and services, from refrigeration to clothes washing to money transfers, that will help them do the "jobs" no current offering adequately can.

With product life cycles growing ever shorter and competition cropping up in unexpected places, nearly every industry is facing disruption. How can you tell if your model is running out of gas? For starters, if your next-generation innovations provide smaller and smaller improvements and your people have trouble thinking of new ways to enhance your offering. Pay heed to the signs and start experimenting with several new options until you find one that will turn your threat into an opportunity.

Most executives believe that competing through business models is critical for success, but few have come to grips with how best to do so. One common mistake, the authors' studies show, is enterprises' unwavering focus on creating innovative models and evaluating their efficacy in standalone fashion-just as engineers test new technologies or products. However, the success or failure of a company's business model depends largely on how it interacts with those of the other players in the industry. (Almost any business model will perform brilliantly if a company is lucky enough to be the only one in a market.) Because companies build them without thinking about the competition, they routinely deploy doomed business models. Moreover, many companies ignore the dynamic elements of business models and fail to realize that they can design business models to generate winner-take-all effects similar to the network externalities that high-tech companies such as Microsoft, eBay, and Facebook often create. A good business model creates virtuous cycles that, over time, result in competitive advantage. Smart companies know how to strengthen their virtuous cycles, undermine those of rivals, and even use them to turn competitors' strengths into weaknesses.

Corporate strategy often seems abstract to managers on the ground, who struggle to translate it into a realistic plan of action. But a process called strategy briefing, which originated with the military, can help them overcome that challenge. Bungay, the director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre, describes in this article how briefings can move managers and their reports from confusion about a complex set of goals and performance measures to clarity about just which objectives each person needs to focus on and in what order. Using a fictional case study as an illustration, Bungay outlines the five critical steps of the process: (1) State your intent, or what you are expected to do and why, (2) Revise it in the context of your company's situation, (3) Determine which measures indicate whether you're achieving your goal, (4) Define the tasks implied by your intent, (5) Define the boundaries, or constraints, that limit your team. A single strategy briefing can help a team perform better, but the real magic happens when briefings roll down through an entire organization. When that occurs, the company's strategy is broken into a cascade of discrete but linked elements. In the end, people will be strategically aligned and operationally autonomous-a combination that is one of the hallmarks of high-performance organizations.

Now that the global recession is officially over, multinationals are starting to weigh their options for foreign investment. But everywhere they look, negatives vie with positives, and government actions and contradictory economic trends confuse the picture: Brazil is planning to spend while Australia is cutting back. Trade tensions are rising between the United States and China. Indonesia tempts inflation by keeping rates low. Managers need a way to cut through the chaos and figure out which countries are the best bets and which pose the greatest risks. The authors, drawing on Eurasia Group's political analyses and on economic databases, have assigned scores to a selection of countries on the basis of their macroeconomic conditions and foreign investment environments. The result is a practical guide for determining where growth is likely, which governments are encouraging or impeding foreign investment, and which sectors provide the greatest opportunities. Some of the results are surprising.

The authors argue that today's leaders suffer from a common logical fallacy: they tend to see what they want to see and don't ask the harder questions that might lead in other directions. As a result, they fall victim to their own thinking -- to a willingness to 'mash together' competing logics without giving it a second thought. The remedy, they argue, is to dig deeper into the logic of opposing choices, to test your assumptions and explicitly seek to understand the ways in which conditions and consequences are linked. They explain how 'integrative thinkers' explicitly use the tensions between opposing ideas to generate new and better solutions.