9. Find your NEW Competitive Advantage
CLO with CXOs (knocking CEO’s cabin) : May we come in? CEO : Of course. Thanks Leaders for taking time out to Explore and catch the new trends affecting our business. Mr. CLO, What's Next? CLO : Yes, Now that trends and the competitive landscape is ready, let's focus on finding our New Competitive Advantage. Here are the steps to do that :
1. Identify Impact of external trends on your Existing Business Model
This is the Business Model Canvas. Like every business, we should have filled this earlier. Now is the time to identify the impact of new trends on the same.
Let's re-fill this properly to get a very good clarity on what is changing and how it is going to affect our way of doing business.
Once we identify the impact of new trends on our business model, we will move on to the next step below.
2. Find out your New Competitive Advantage
This is the real game. How we do business is going to change due to the new external environment and that is going to affect our competitive advantage. From the earlier step you know what is going to change in our business model,
now identify key capabilities that will make our company outperform. This will be our Competitive Advantage.
(Note : Finding the Competitive Advantage is more of an art than a science. This is why we need involvement of senior leadership, who have deep customer insights, here.)
3. OutLearn or Outsource
Now that we have identified key capabilities, we need to build them in our organization. Leave no stone unturned for this. This is where we must OutLearn. Other capabilities can stay tactical. This will be what is called as a Capability Model for our organization. Don't worry about jargons, it is nothing but classifying our capabilities into three levels as shown below :
Check this video to get an idea on How to Create a Capability Model
Once we are ready with out Capability Model, we will Explore each and everything about those Core Capabilities (technology, tricks, people development etc) and Exploit them to the fullest! We will treat remaining capabilities according to their level from the model.
One more thing,
Let's build our capabilities in a modular way so that any capability can be used for multiple internal processes to deliver our products/services to multiple category of customers.
Owners of a capability will continuously develop that capability only and we can easily integrate updated versions into our organizational processes.
CEO : That's a great plan. Let's find the impact of trends on our business model, find our new competitive advantage and build our new Capability Model. Let's Explore and Exploit!
WHY this Newsletter :
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This article was first published here
Note : To make your L&D work better organized and plan tasks using right tools, we have built 'The CLO Planner', using world class PARA framework by Tiago Forte, which can be DUPLICATED for FREE using instructions here.