This article first appeared in Your Business magazine. Imagine you’re going to sell your business ten years from now. How much is it going to be worth? What are you going to do between now and then to increase its value steadily and substantially? In answer to those questions, the management consultant Peter Drucker is [...]
Strategy is both the promise and the responsibility to make a difference to the life of a business. It is important. A lot rests on its shoulders. And yet strategy starts with something that appears to be disarmingly simple. At the core of any business there is a handful of words, usually a line or two, [...]
The twin strands of a company’s DNA. Even the most mundane B2B brand generates shareholder value. 30 to 40 percent of the value of any share market in the world is generated by brands. Nike’s brand, being a mass consumer brand, generates 70 percent of its shareholder value. Given those figures, why wouldn’t a [...]
Protecting and unlocking the value of a business. It is a Big Ask for a product to be the only source of what makes a business matter. Even if a business has developed a competitive edge, you can be sure it will be copied. Even if a business has committed to constant innovation, you can [...]
Nothing is more important to the fortunes of a business than understanding why it matters. How will it make a difference to its customers’ lives? What meaningful contribution will it make, functionally, as a product, and emotionally, as a brand? What’s in it for them? Write this understanding down in a handful of words. Everything else [...]
Businesses need to know that they matter. And why. They need to believe that what they do today matters enough to contribute their fortunes and their sustainability tomorrow. This is the both the promise and the responsibility of strategy. I believe our consultancy matters because: I have the ability to get to grips with the heart of [...]
(A shorter version of this article appeared in the Financial Mail Redzone on 28 October 2016: http://www.financialmail.co.za/redzone/2016/10/27/crossing-the-chasm1) Crossing the chasm Both intrinsic and extrinsic solutions must inform a business strategy linking a company with its customers. Mark Varder On one side of the chasm is your business. On the other, the people you would like [...]
Change and growth are difficult. As in personal and political life, so too in business life. "It might be said that living means, above all, dealing with problems. Unsolved problems tend to cause a kind of mental anguish. Whether this has always been so may well be questioned, but it is certainly so in the modern [...]
This article first appeared in the Financial Mail on 8 July 2016. The chicken and the egg of business and brand. Professor Cynthia Montgomery, past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard, regards purpose as the first step in developing a business strategy. But is that right? There is the chicken and the egg. [...]
This article appeared in the Financial Mail's Redzone on 1 June 2016. The value of brands that push back. The cliché is that products should be silver bullets and that brands should make life as rosy as a possible. But when brands ask people to do their fair share of the work, they make a [...]
