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Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption

Better Essays

80 Harvard Business Review

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October 2008

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hbr.org

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STRATEGY in a World of
Constant Disruption
A company’s bid to rally an industry ecosystem around a new competitive view is an uncertain gambit. But the right strategic approaches and the availability of modern digital infrastructures improve the odds for success.

SHAPING

Jonathan Bartlett

G

by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

GOOGLE GRABS HEADLINES

by announcing forays into the telecom space, prompting competitive responses from AT&T, Verizon, and other leading network service providers. At the same time, Google continues to help shape the advertising business through AdSense. And Facebook and Salesforce.com – each in …show more content…

This process creates ever-shifting eddies that reshape institutions, identities, practices, and relationships, making equilibrium a distant memory. The core technology infrastructures that once formed the bedrock have turned into plasma. No wonder executives around the world feel deepening stress as they survey the mutating business landscape. Their natural reaction is to focus on core markets, capabilities, and geographies; to seek more control over the assets and activities that are most valuable to that core; and to emphasize the short term and become more reactive. But these actions often compound the stress instead of easing it. Today’s new digital infrastructure in fact gives relatively small actions and investments an impact disproportionate

the prospects for shaping success from the realms of the improbable and rare into the zone of the merely difficult. At one level, of course, all successful strategies can be viewed as shaping strategies. Some corporate leaders reshape markets and industries using M&A-driven roll-up strategies, tapping into previously unseen economies of scale and scope. Disruptive innovation also reshapes markets, typically through negative incentives that say, in effect, “Change your ways now or else become marginalized, even die.” The classic icons of recent strategy literature – companies like Dell

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