Strategy isn’t just about your actions — it’s about your actions in relation to other players in the market. You might find your defensive strategy puts you further behind your more aggressive competition and when you come out of that defensive stance ready to compete aggressively again, you may have a lot of catch-up to play. While being defensive is certainly understandable, you could be creating many more risks than you believe you are. Conduct a rigorous market assessment before choosing a stance. 

• 5 Essential Business Strategy Tools
• Why it takes curiosity and support to innovate, curiosity is the root of innovation, but collaboration and corporate support are necessary for ideas to become realities. There is a vast difference between posting a motivational slogan for innovation and implementing practices that support innovation.
• Strategy requires core functions and new ideas, companies during this pandemic must protect core businesses even as they create mechanisms for thinking about new opportunities, write Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden of Harvard Business School. Cross-functional teams and agile structures can be valuable in identifying areas of inefficiency, along with tactics such as “the clean sheet of paper exercise,” which asks executives to imagine rebuilding the company from scratch.
• Why capacity needs as much attention as output, Enron is a classic example of a company that focused on output without proper attention to capacity, and many companies today don’t understand their capacity or the difference between “inputs” and “outputs,” writes Valeria Maltoni. “I’m not comparing your company to Enron, but I’ve found that it’s often hard to tell what a company knows and what it doesn’t know,” she writes.
• Success can prevent companies from embracing new ideas, Xerox could have cornered the personal computer market as early as the 1970s, but it succumbed to “the competency trap,” in which companies focus on their cash cows at the expense of innovation. “What is crucial is to have ways to challenge the status quo, to inject variation in the corporate DNA,” says Loizos Heracleous of Warwick Business School.
• CEOs say disruption will become a way of life, the world has changed because of the coronavirus pandemic and the government’s inconsistent response, with CEOs and other leaders expecting continued disruption in how work is done. “If in six months we find out that the coronavirus is going to mutate every year and we’re going to have to worry about this every year, then it’s a very different scenario than a once-in-a-lifetime change,” says board consultant Harry Broadman.

• Why small is good when it comes to wins and losses, visible signs of progress help people feel motivated and energized, and these “small wins” can be more successful than setting large goals that feel overwhelming, writes Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor. “Change initiatives built on small wins have another virtue: When things go bad, as they often do, failure leads to modest disappointments rather than catastrophic setbacks,” he writes.

• Focus on these 3 time horizons for your strategy, companies should be looking at strategic planning for this year, next year and the period beginning in 2025, as well as running scenarios for key business drivers — and their opposites. “Scenarios need to be regularly updated, as, over time, the certainty of direction will increase; therefore, the initial portfolio will also have to be adjusted as well,” they write.
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• Know your “why,” and figure out the rest as you go, companies need to understand the “why” behind a change, but they can afford to act with less-than-100% certainty about the “what” or “how”. This approach allows for speed and also allows you to incorporate feedback from across the organization, and in particular the front line.

• Scenario planning for the next new normal: 7 key questions, scenario planning is a highly effective approach to objectively preparing for the next and ever-evolving normal. Here’s how to get started.

• Here are 3 key parts of strategic thinking, strategic thinking can be thought of as a three-step process, starting with a scan for information across sources, organizing that data according to our internal framings and the conscious effort to push back on our own thinking. Can you be more conscious of the frame you are choosing and make that thinking more visible to others?

• How fearless organizations succeed,  three steps leaders can take to create psychological safety, the prerequisite for greater innovation and growth.

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Include OCM Techniques When Implementing Portfolio Management Practices

Most organizations do not follow a consistent Portfolio management methodology of any kind. So, how do you proceed with an initiative to introduce Portfolio management within an organization? The key to a Portfolio like this is recognizing that a Portfolio management initiative requires Portfolio managers to do things differently. It requires them to manage larger Portfolios more proactively, consistently, and rigorously. It also requires different behaviors of the people who work on Portfolios and those who are the Portfolio’s stakeholders.

Because we are trying to change the way people do their jobs, this type of effort is known as an organizational change management initiative. It is all about trying to change the culture. Driving culture change requires much more than simply teaching new skills, although training certainly plays a part. You must evaluate various aspects of the organization that drives behaviors. Processes that drive good Portfolio management behaviors need to be reinforced. Processes that are barriers to good Portfolio management behaviors need to be changed or eliminated. Resistance to the change must be accounted for and expected. It must also be overcome.

The success criteria for implementing Portfolio management include the following.

• • Stakeholder management. In any culture change initiative, it is crucial to recognize the various impacted stakeholder groups. You should then perform stakeholder analysis to understand their interest, power, and motivation. You can use this information to create a stakeholder management plan to engage stakeholders based on their specific characteristics.
  • A multi-faceted approach. Recognize that implementation is more than introducing new templates and initial training. It requires a multi-faceted approach that includes long-term communication, a standard methodology, training for all stakeholders (Portfolio managers, team members, and managers), coaching services, repository management, etc.
  • A long-term commitment. You must have long-term staying power. The Portfolio management initiative will likely take at least a year for a small organization and 3-5 years for a larger one.
  • Strong sponsorship. You have to have robust and stable sponsorship. It is not uncommon for the CIO or an EVP to sponsor a Portfolio management initiative. It is common that when the sponsor is replaced, the new CIO or EVP does not share the passion for Portfolio management. The entire initiative was canceled before the culture change could be fully adopted.
  • Manage as a Portfolio. The Portfolio management implementation work must be planned and managed as a Portfolio. This will help ensure the work is scheduled, budgeted, coordinated, etc.
  • A scalable model. Implement the new processes in a scalable manner. In other words, do not require a lot of overhead for small Portfolios, while at the same time, you need to ensure that there is much more rigor and structure for large Portfolios. Over-applying mandatory Portfolio management processes on smaller Portfolios is a common reason an organization does not adopt the culture change.

Deploying Portfolio management processes and building Portfolio management capability in the organization requires much more than simply training the staff and walking away. You need a holistic and multi-faceted plan to engage the stakeholders effectively so that the change can be adopted and utilized long-term.

3/2/2023

Lifecycle of events such as an investment that has reached a total cost of ownership thresholds and environmental circumstances. An event’s potential impact on risk or reward within the IT portfolio makes an event relevant as a trigger. Predetermined actions prepare portfolio managers for quick decisions if a trigger event occurs. Advanced considerations of potential actions prepare management with options for a quick decision. When business agility means competitive advantage, they make such decisions and can provide an edge. Establishing triggers without developing reaction plans can waste time and resources and determine an appropriate tactic.

Rebalancing investments may occur once triggers are defined, and management monitors the environment for triggering events. When one occurs, portfolio performance is assessed against triggers to determine whether acting on the trigger will improve the reward or reduce risk. Changes affect the possible risk faced by organizations or the possible returns. When the potential risk or return is significant, organizations establish measurement thresholds – variances or limits at which they will consider reacting to the change by rebalancing the investment mix in their portfolio. Associating triggers with actions that may be taken at the threshold is not an appropriate portfolio management decision-making step.