Business Strategy - Page 5 of 10 - Branding Strategy Insider

We are trained to be solution-finders. In school, we are given questions and graded on the quality of our solutions. As we develop in our careers, management examines the solutions that we propose, not the questions that we have asked. For annual reviews, “performance” is usually defined as creating and implementing solutions rather than finding the best problems to tackle. We become wonderfully efficient at solving problems, even if they are the wrong ones to solve. Few kudos come from...

We’ve seen how tech-oriented companies have thrived in the pandemic, from Amwell in telemedicine to Zoom in tele-everything. But what about the rest of the economy? One fast-growing pizza chain shows that Covid can create a Great Reboot for all kinds of industries. The story of this company – rooted in five key steps taken by leadership – holds lessons for all types of organizations seeking to use this moment as an opportunity for reinvention.

During the late twentieth century, most leaders of global companies felt obliged to serve one master above others: investors. The game, they thought, was to maximize returns to shareholders, and they left it to governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to solve global warming, poverty, water scarcity, and other abiding societal problems.

You know what your customers are buying, but do you know what they’re really trying to get done? As business management legend Peter Drucker wrote over 50 years ago, “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him.” More recently, Harvard’s Clayton Christensen popularized the concept that people are trying to get jobs done, and oftentimes a very wide assortment of products and services – as well as doing nothing – compete to...