Discovery Driven Growth - Mistakes Companies Make
CIO Magazine's recent blog post features a summary of some of the principles of Discovery Driven Growth, and links the idea to concepts of IT agility. Wouldn't it be great if CIO's and CFO's could embrace discovery-driven principles?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on August 03, 2010
Uncertainty and risk in discovery driven planning
I was recently fortunate enough to be teaching in a very interesting program for strategy consultants at IBM. One of their senior leaders, an ex-BCG guy, pointed out to me that I really could use a picture to communicate the value of Discovery Driven Growth. Here, therefore is his suggestion! What it basically shows you is how uncertainty is brought down simultaneously with investment increasing so that you tie the level of investment you are making to the level of uncertainty you face. Pretty interesting idea.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on July 24, 2010
20 Often-Fatal Assumptions
I am often asked by corporations to give some illustrations of assumptions that have caused more trouble than they had any right to in the development of new business plans. Here, for your edification and amusement, are twenty of the ones that have popped up frequently and which have often led otherwise sensible new ventures astray:
- Other divisions in the company will be glad to help
- All we need is 5% market share!
- The firm will surely support the best strategy for our unit
- We will have no trouble attracting the right people to work on the project
- Competitors will roll over and play dead - or hey, maybe they won't notice your taking market share away from them
- Competitors are too...dumb, insignificant, small, unproven, badly capitalized or un-interesting...to worry about
- We can use the same key performance indicators in new markets that we use in existing markets (ditto for funding strategies, planning processes, reward systems...)
- Customers will buy it because it has these neat features!
- Customers won't feel that buying from us is risky
- Customers won't mind switching suppliers and will be happy to take on whatever work is involved
- We can create a compelling first-mover advantage (corollary: we have to spend a lot to get in first and obtain significant market share so that we can protect our position)
- We can develop what we need on time and on budget
- It will sell itself!
- We will be able to hold our prices and gain market share
- There is no real competition for what we offer
- Joint venture and alliance partners, and our own suppliers, share our objectives
- We won't need to engage in training for suppliers, distributors or customers
- The technically superior product will triumph
- We can create new markets where there is no competition, quickly
- Our projections will be accurate
Have a look at your business plans for a new project and see if any of these little bombshells are lurking there - forewarned is forearmed!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on July 12, 2010
Interesting “innochat” on Twitter regarding Discovery Driven Planning
A nice shout-out to Jose Briones for moderating an "innochat" on the subject of discovery diven planning. You can see the slides he used to introduce the subject at this link: Slideshare.
I've been off the grid for a bit - trip to Ireland for the Senior Executive Program at the Irish Management Institute, the Microsoft CEO Summit the following week and in the last few days a "family heritage" trip with my parents and daughter.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on May 31, 2010
Discovery Driven Planning for CIO’s
In this blog Steve Miller notes that DDP can be a bridge between 'searching' activities and 'planning' activities and suggests how the idea could be imported to the world of IT.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 22, 2009
