Video produced for the book “Strategy” published by Vuibert editions.
Business leaders are not immune to herd behavior and even fashion trends. Bosses and strategy consultants frequent the same circles, meet at the same conferences, read the same magazines, discover every day in the press the choices made by their competitors or quite simply by companies in other sectors. And then – without going so far as to speak of pan-urgism… which would be negative – let’s say that the players in the strategy experience a bandwagon effect, a imitation effect like many in our hyperconnected world.
What is impossible today is “doing everything alone”; do it in an….. isolated manner, do it relying solely on one’s own means. On the contrary, the boundaries of the company are now blurred: we are talking about an extended company, a company whose borders with the outside world are poorly or poorly defined, a company living in an ecosystem.
Let’s imagine a platform for connecting tourists who want to travel without going to classic hotels and owners of apartments and houses well located in major capitals around the world. Can this company open a strategic path alone? Certainly not: its ecosystem brings together concierge companies, photographers to showcase the properties on offer, cleaning companies, events and activity organization agencies. Our platform cannot act alone.
What type of relationship does this platform have with its environment?
• Relations of partnership firstly which range from the simple exchange of letters to seal an agreement to the drawing up of a formal contract.
• Relations of cooperation then with a real sharing of tasks in the value chain. The platform uses its IT expertise and cooperates with graphic designers and layout designers for the advertisements posted on its site
• Relations of networking Finally. We move from doing things in pairs to doing things together, to doing things in groups, either because we bring together common expertise to gain power or because we add diverse expertise to broaden the portfolio of activities.
Let’s leave our platform here to go to a very, very, controlled appellation cheese manufacturer in the heart of France. The manufacturer continually needs milk from sheep raised in a specific territory. This manufacturer drives a real network of farms linked by precise specifications and therefore producing the expected milk in the required quantity and quality. This is the strength of a network.
Does this mean that by sacrificing to the fashions of the moment we must leave aside the classic orientations which have proven themselves? Obviously not. We thus observe a real panoply of diverse orientations. It’s a mix, a cocktail that brings all the flavor to observing the strategic choices of a company.
We manage our partnerships with determination, we integrate into networks by regularly measuring the benefits and constraints but also we operate alone when the context requires it, we develop a micro activity on the outskirts of the network in which we are inserted, we buy a partner to better master the products of prior cooperation.
A French car manufacturer alone opens a new assembly line, joins forces with a software producer to imagine the future driverless car and merges with an Italian competitor to climb onto the podium of world manufacturers.
Everyone knows that the flavor of a cocktail is due to the skillful mixing of the proportions given to each ingredient rather than to the intrinsic quality of each. It is somewhat the same for the strategic choices of companies.
We are therefore far from the strategic silos arising from a simplistic academic vision. The life of a company is more like a patchwork in which overall performance is sought through the choice of partnerships, cooperation and networks.
2024-01-02 23:07:34
#Cathy #Alegria #Xerfi #Understanding #companys #ecosystem #partnerships #cooperation #networks #Understanding
