The end of competitive advantage and the value of innovation

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Benefits

The workshop participants will learn

How to evaluate an uncertain investment in new initiatives:
How much to invest in what stages, when to decide on discontinuing the initiatives, etc. How to minimize the downside and maximise the upside of new initiative investments by using discovery driven planning tools. Sustainability of potential profits combine to turn apparently risky investments into blockbuster opportunities. Introduce managers to new ways of thinking about strategic growth. Change thinking from a reliance on historical performance measurements to a predictive mindset that answers the questions:         • What will happen?
        • What must happen?
        • How risky is it?
        • How do we slice out the risk?

Create a mindset that embraces de-risked uncertainty as a source of opportunity. Learn to de-risk new product development, market development and large internal initiatives. Develop an upgraded approach to financial thinking.

Companies who have sent delegates to a semilar workshop earlier have benefited in the following ways:

A Global Logistics Company was able to redefine the business model for the entire organization and opened up the international market. A large company was able to decide that it needs to dissolve a venture and license its technology to incumbents to recoup a portion of the investment. An International Services Company was able to ramp up new product development considerably with less cost. A major international company implemented DDP as the process to evaluate all new growth opportunities. A chemicals company used DDP as the key process for assessing and managing new development projects throughout the global operations.

Here is what the CEO of Alliance Boots say:

The idea of the end of competitive advantage by Rita McGrath could not have been more timely. Any leader seeking to understand what it takes to win in the ruthlessly competitive markets most of us are faced with today, will benefit from hearing Rita. In my thirty -two years as a retailer (beginning as a “Saturday boy” at Boots in Glasgow), I have personally witnessed a dramatic acceleration of the pace of change and the upending of assumptions we used to take for granted. Shopping behavior is changing dramatically. We are witnessing the end of advantages that made our 163-year-old Boots brand iconic. Consumers give business less permission to be wrong than ever before, and the Boots brand is not immune to this shift.

We were first introduced to Rita’s ideas when Boots Group merged with Alliance UniChem in 2006 to form Alliance Boots, and the breathing room that followed allowed us to take this newly formed company private on 2007. At that time we decided to transform the organization in a way that would enable us to operate very differently – by putting our customers first. Working with Rita, who is a gifted and original thinker, we sought to embed many of her frameworks into the leadership mind-set of our new organization. And we continue to do that today. We seek to be quicker and more decisive. We seek to be more candid, so that pending news—even negative news—travels fast and is immediately addressed. We seek to spend more time thinking about the future than we ever have before. We seek to break down silos so that our organization is appropriately structured to capture opportunities and act as one unified entity. Most of all, we seek to create courageous leaders—leaders who regard the fast pace of competitive exchange as exciting and who are fully engaged in creating an organization that can boldly capture opportunities and just as boldly move away from strategies and business practices that no longer represent opportunities.

When we started our evolution, many observers were skeptical. The boots brand was tired and undervalued, they said, and the strategy poorly explained and not all that were executed. Moreover, our new business model, which combined a business-to-business wholesale operation with a customer-focused retail business, had seldom proved to be successful. But our results have proven our critics wrong. Measures assessing the recognition of our brand, satisfaction of our customers, and engagement of out employees are at record levels, and the profitability of Alliance Boots has been increasing by at least 10 percent every year since its privatization. And all this was achieved despite the global recession.

Our evolution, like yours, is far from over. We believe, however, that the concept of strategy presented by Rita is invaluable. Strategy needs to change because customers and markets are changing faster than ever!


Alex Gourlay Chief Executive, Health and Beauty Division, Alliance Boots Nottingham, United Kingdom.

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PLEASE CALL US ON: 080 2223 1550, 2299 7117 OR SEND AN EMAIL TO IMEDIA@VSNL.COM

Cancellation Policy: Once registered there is no cancellation possible. This is to ensure that the limited seats available are allocated properly. However, it is possible to change the delegate even at the last minute and the event of a cancellation, the full fee will be refunded within a week. In case of a postponement of the event due to reasons beyond anyone's control, the fee may be used to attend any other event of ours or retain the same for the new date of the event.