Should We Stay or Should We Go? – Part Two
By Paul Wiefels, managing director & co-founder of Chasm Group, LLC In the first installment we looked at three environmental questions as part of a framework to inform whether a change in strategic course is warranted. Now, we examine the internal contexts for strategy change, with a particular view to the inertial factors that can hinder or prevent success. First, ask where and what are the sources of organizational inertia. At the risk of generalizing a bit, most businesses lean to being either customer-centric or operations-centric. Each model is the basic source of how the business creates and conveys value. They are fit for purpose. One is not inherently “better” than the other. The customer-centric organization is optimized for pursuing and managing relatively low-volume, high-complexity systems linked for example to B2B software applications, biotech solutions, outsourced or professional services, and so on. The operation-centric organization, by contrast, operates best where products or services are delivered at significant scale through high-volume transactions, e.g., consumables, B2C apps, supply chain services and the like. Think of these as businesses with lots of moving parts. This does not imply that you are one thing and thus not the other. Rather, think “handedness.” We