Page 75 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Developing a Strategy 65

communities and also particularly try to reach both children in lower-
income households without cable access and others using digital devices
for streaming. The “how” of the strategy that eventually emerged was to
develop a high-quality, curriculum-based, noncommercial educational
service that was cross-platform in delivery and interactivity.

From problems to opportunities
To begin developing the “where” and “how” choices for your strategy, con-
sider the problems you identified in the previous step—for example, an out-
of-date business model, encroaching competitors, maturing product lines,
and so on. As you consider these problems, your analysis may well suggest
new ideas to do something excitingly better and different. Look for oppor-
tunities for winning in some new way, suited to the changing environment,
such as leveraging a new technology to improve your cost position, rede-
ploying your talent to improve a customer experience, or adapting prod-
ucts to changing cultural tastes. You may also want to consider whether
partnering or even acquiring another business may open new opportuni-
ties for creating more value for customers. Keep asking yourself and your
strategy team: Is there something superior and distinctive we could do, in
light of what we’re learning about our company and its competitive, exter-
nal operating context?
Developing the best strategic options requires creativity in addition to
analytic skills. Leaders can often boost creative capability by examining
innovative approaches to growth in other businesses and brainstorming
whether there are patterns that they could adapt to their own company.
You can also find fresh thinking outside your strategy-making team: have
the members brainstorm with your frontline people, explore new innova-
tive approaches by collaborating with lead customers, or call on networks
beyond your company. For example, you could partner with a university or
design firm, or work with outside experts to adapt a wholly different busi-
ness model from another industry.
Throughout our executive interviews, we constantly heard about
strategy making that was based on options developed by learning from
others—McKinsey’s global managing partner Dominic Barton raising up