It was westward ho! last week as Omnicom Media Group descended on Las Vegas, Nevada, for a 5 day conference.
Now I've recovered (from the jet-lag) I'll be posting some of the interesting stuff we learned from the great array of speakers that were bussed in to talk to us. Starting with my favourite, Vijay Govindarajan, of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, a top ten professor of strategy according to Forbes, Business Week and The 'London' Times and author of 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, an (as yet unread) copy of which is now in our library (I'll get to it this summer, I promise).
He did a fantastic hour and a half slot on the first morning, talking about how to set strategy and how to prioritise resource to make sure you're fit for the future. The rather helpful model for this was the 3 Boxes, which I'll cover in another post this week.
But, just as a little taster, I thought I'd share this rather splendid definition of the role of strategy (we're always keen on that). He put up this chart of the Men's World High Jump record :
You would expect the world record to have progressed gradually and incrementally. As you can see, that's not the case. What actually happens is that, as new jumping techniques are introduced, there is a truncated period of growth followed by a flattening out of the curve until the next new technique comes along. It is the devlopment of these new techniques that Vijay was interested in - in our world these are market or strategic shifts which, once made, cause a rapid growth spurt, then tail off as everyone else catches up.
The take out obviously being that just beacuse you've always done something in a certain way, doesn't mean it's the best way. A point he rammed home rather more bluntly with the excellent Dead Horse Strategy, which I thankfully found here.
Please send in your examples of Fosbury Flops.
And make sure you're planning them for your clients.
-- Toby
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