Strategic Thinking: Strategy + Innovation = Competitive Advantage
Program Titles
- Transform your managers into strategic leaders: Are your managers strategic?
- The Principles of Strategy to Achieve Business and Personal Success
- Strategy For You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want
- Inspire New Thinking with Strategic Leadership Development
- Do you have competitive advantage? Be Strategic or Be Gone
- The world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking
- Becoming a Truly Strategic Leader
- Is Your Strategy Obsolete?
- Are your managers strategic?
Rich Horwath, on strategic thinking, educates, entertains, and energizes your group on the most valuable skill in business today. As a strategist, he helps managers increase profits and create competitive advantage through strategic thinking.
He has a unique combination of practical experience as a former Chief Strategy Officer and academic expertise as a graduate school professor.
Recent studies on leadership by the Wall Street Journal and Chief Executive Magazine have found that strategic thinking is the most valued skill among today’s leaders.
In an interactive and highly relevant session, Rich Horwath helps employees at all levels understand strategy and how to think strategically on a daily basis to help their businesses.
The result is that participants leave with a strategic thinking framework and practical tools to reach their true strategic potential.
Key’s:
• What is strategic thinking?
• Why is strategic thinking important?
• The three disciplines of strategic thinking:
1. Acumen: how to generate new ideas
2. Allocation: how to prioritize activities
3. Action: how to stay focused on the important, not urgent
• Effective ways for generating new ideas that grow profits
• How to use resources (time, people and budget) more productively
Becoming a Truly Strategic Leader
The cause of bankruptcy is bad strategy.
Management teams that don’t have solid, written strategies today may not have a business tomorrow.
Rich Horwath provides an interactive and practical session and takes the mystery out of strategy, simplifies it, and gives participants a five-step process for developing it.
The result is participants leave with a common understanding
of strategy, new tools for developing it, and a process for actually
using it to drive their daily activities.
Key Learning’s:
• What is strategy?
• Why is strategy important?
• The three secrets to great strategy
• Understanding the difference between goals, objectives,
strategies and tactics
• How to transform a business from a commodity into
competitive advantage.
• Practical tools to develop strategies that increase profits
and productivity.
• Adidas
• Pfizer
• Kraft
• Motorola
• State Farm
• Novartis
• Young President’s Organization
• Society for Human Resource Management
Rich is a thought leader on strategy, having appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, WGN and FOX TV.
“Rich provided an outstanding program on strategic thinking and planning. The presentation was interactive…”
“Your program was the most memorable, educational, and dynamic of all. You took the complex topic of strategy and condensed it into an easy-to-understand and entertaining event.”
“Your keynote speech ‘Be Strategic or Be Gone’ was entertaining,
thought-provoking, and yet practical for a large audience of
senior executives. It was exactly what we hoped for and a big hit.”
“Rich can both present his material & engage his audience in an entertaining and informative way. His Strategic Leadership exercises are necessary for anyone wanting to achieve their wildest goals.”
“From his content to his delivery, Rich’s presentations on strategic thinking are impeccable.”
“Strategic thinking is the most valued skill in leaders today,
according to the Wall Street Journal.”
“Many companies have innovation departments, and it is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door. Everybody in our company is responsible for being innovative, whether they’re doing operational work, product work, or customer service work.”
Whether you’re six or sixty years old, there’s nothing quite like bouncing into other vehicles and not requiring a tow truck for the ride home.
Hopefully, you’re not working for a bumper car business–where most people’s activities are simply reactions: reactions to competitors, reactions to customers, and responses to the market. These constant reactions spin you off into time-sucking tangents that add no value to you or the business.
“… A ten-year study of 103 companies showed that strategic blunders caused the greatest loss of shareholder value, an astounding 81% of the time.
The hard truth is that nearly 90% of a company’s poor performance is within management’s control. Of course, there are lots of good excuses for companies’ poor performance, but they are just that: excuses.
Essential business concepts allow us to replace excuses and poor performance with direction and profits.
Strategy and innovation are often shown to be two primary contributors to sustained financial excellence and competitive advantage.
I’ve discovered three common elements of strategy and innovation that can help us better understand and influence business success.
Common Element #1: Insight.
An insight is the unique combination of two or more pieces of information or data that creates a new approach, product, service, or solution. Insights come from the ability to wade through the waves of input we receive daily and mentally connect the dots in new and creative ways.
Prolific inventor James Dyson built his billion-dollar business through insights into what frustrated people. His first significant invention–the Ballbarrow–was a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel. This insight came from people’s frustration with the wheels getting stuck in the mud and rendered useless.
Innovation, defined as “creating new value for customers,” begins with an insight. The insight often centers on a solution to a problem or a way to fulfill a customer’s unmet need. To create new value, you need an insight.
Business strategy is the intelligent allocation of limited resources through a unique activity system to outperform the competition in serving customers.
The only way to truly “intelligently” allocate resources is to have insight into how your product or service provides value to customers in ways that are superior to competitive offerings.
Insight Starter: What unsolved problem can you help your customer overcome?
Common Element #2: Differentiation.
At the heart of a successful business strategy is the ability to differentiate your offerings from those of the competition in ways that customers value.
Doing the same things in the same way as the competition and providing the same offerings is a typical formula for bankruptcy.
Inherent in the definition of innovation is creating “new” value.
If the value is new, then it’s logical to conclude that it’s different from current offerings.
As James Dyson said when he seized leadership of the upright vacuum market from Hoover with his cyclone technology,
“And so I have sought originality for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy that demands difference from what exists if only to redefine a stale market.”
Differentiation Starter: What unique capabilities do we possess to create differentiated customer value?
Common Element #3: Value.
Both business strategy and innovation aim to create value for customers.
Too often, in the day-to-day competitive battles and the business weeds, we lose sight of the fact that competitive advantage is nothing more than “creating superior value for customers.”
Innovation is the continual hunt for new value; strategy ensures that we configure our resources in the best way possible to deliver that value. James Dyson sums it up: “The only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new that has style value as well as substance and which they cannot get anywhere else.”
Value Starter: What is our value proposition, and how is it different from competitors?
Strategy development should not be a once-a-year event but an ongoing dialogue about the key business issues and capturing insights from those discussions.
Innovation- creating new value for customers- is an integral part of the strategy conversation.
If your leadership team does not invest at least four hours a month in discussing strategy and innovation together, then expect sustained mediocrity.
Books by Rich Horwath
- Deep Dive: The Proven Method for Building Strategy, Focusing Your Resources, and Taking Smart Action
- Strategy for You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want
- Elevate: The Three Disciplines of Advanced Strategic Thinking
- STRATEGIC The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence
- StrategyMan vs. The Anti-Strategy Squad Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan
Book Rich Horwath for your Event!