University of Dayton Emerging Leaders Program - Strategic Business Development

This week I experienced a very good session in my program - Strategic Business Development. The session was given by a well-seasoned teacher / facilitator / consultant and focused on how to overcome thinking patterns that block business growth, learn various strategies and use simple financial analysis to understand these strategies.

Overall a good session and I particularly liked the case studies. Often a failed case study can teach you more about something than a successful one. Several were reviewed in several industries with an emphasis about how people define their markets ( their available and playable markets). This emphasis could lead (in one example) from a soft drink company redefining their market from "soft drinks" to "liquid refreshment" and reclassified their market share as "share of stomach".

One overlooked concept in this session is that as a mid-level manager I'm forced to implement someone else's strategy (rather than setting it myself). Perhaps when I get to senior levels, I'll be able to use this more fully.

My favorite part of the session was the discussion around corporate strategy alternatives.

1. Stability strategies

2. Organizational renewal strategies

3. Growth strategies

Often I find someone who says "We want to grow, we are using a growth strategy" but upon review, it clearly is NOT a growth strategy but rather a restructuring or a profit-maximization or resource-stripping one. Resource-stripping is my term to describe setting up a business for a harvest or divestment strategy. I outline them below.

Resource-Stripping
1. Reduce / eliminate new product work, product line extensions, etc.
2. Trim product offering to "just the basics", rationalization of old SKUs and so forth.
3. Reduce people / time commitment to the business - lowering the cost to serve.
4. Push up pricing on low volume specialty products - driving the demand to fewer package sizes or more standard products (one size fits all).
5. Closing production sites, branch offices or warehouses.
6. Reducing marketing expenses to low or non-existent levels.

I've lived through the above scenario myself...


Overall a good session with healthy debate.