Business strategy is at an evolutionary crossroads. It’s time to resolve the long-standing tension between the inherent identity of your organization and the fleeting nature of your competitive advantage.

Photo illustration by Holly Lindem

It’s 8 a.m. in the executive conference room of a large global packaged-foods manufacturer (a real company, its name withheld to preserve confidentiality). For the past two months, a team made up of 15 senior people has been exploring options for growth, winnowing them down to three basic strategies. Each is now summed up in a crisp 20-minute presentation.
The first option focuses on innovation. The company would rapidly develop and launch many new types of snacks and foods, packaged in new and interesting ways, offering leading-edge nutrition and convenience.
Under the second option, the company would get closer to its customers, producing the food people ask for. It could incorporate ideas gathered online into its offerings and provide busy working families with customizable, convenient, and well-balanced meals.
The third option would involve transforming the dynamics of the relevant food sectors by competing more aggressively. The company would become a category leader by investing in new process technology, rightsizing operations to push costs down, and completing key acquisitions.
After the screen goes blank, the CEO leans forward and asks a simple question: “Which strategy would give us the greatest right to win?” His tone, calm and direct, makes everyone sit up a little straighter. And they probably should, for this is the core question underlying every business strategy, although it isn’t always phrased that way.
A right to win is the ability to engage in any competitive market with a better-than-even chance of success — not just in the short term, but consistently….

Imagine a coach, observing a player entering a sports competition, saying, “That kid has the right to win out there.” Or a teacher, watching a student about to take a test, saying, “That student deserves to excel.” What they are really saying is, “That contestant is the right player, in the right type of contest, with the precise capabilities needed to meet this particular challenge.” Of course, the contestant will lose at times, but over the years, a consistent innate advantage will establish itself, giving this contestant the ability to pull off seeming miracles while making it all look easy. This essential advantage is particularly rare in business — a more free-form and unpredictable game than sports or academia. But it is increasingly important at a time of unprecedented competitiveness.
The phrase right to win may strike some observers as arrogant. After all, no company has this kind of assurance handed to it. But that’s precisely the point. The right to win cannot be taken for granted. It must be earned. You earn it by making a series of pragmatic choices that align your most distinctive and important capabilities with the way you approach your chosen customers, and with the discipline to offer only the products and services that fit. At Booz & Company, where we call this approach a capabilities-driven strategy, research and experience have led us to conclude that only high levels of coherence — among market strategy, capabilities systems, and a company’s portfolio of offerings — can give any firm the right to win.
All corporate strategies are at heart theories about the right to win. That is why, for those trying to understand the nature of business success, the history of strategy is both helpful and fascinating. One valuable recent source is The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Harvard Business Press, 2010), in which former Fortune managing editor Walter Kiechel recounts the prevailing theories of business strategy over the past 50 years, and the stories of the people who developed them. Drawing on Kiechel’s history and those of others, such as Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel in Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide through the Wilds of Strategic Management (2nd ed., FT Prentice Hall, 2009), we have created a map of this conceptual landscape, organized on the basic principles underlying theories of the right to win. (See Exhibit 1.) The map depicts four broad schools of strategy; each represents a hypothesis about the nature of long-term success in a competitive world.

The Basic Tension in Strategy

Business strategy, as we know it today, has a relatively short history. The word strategy was first applied in print to mainstream business in 1962, with the publication of Alfred Chandler’s book Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (MIT Press). Since then, at least a dozen major trends and ideas have appeared under the rubric of business strategy, often in great conflict with one another, often drawing companies in very different directions. Despite their differences, all four schools of strategy represent attempts to resolve the same basic underlying problem: the tension between two conflicting business realities.
The first reality is that advantage is transient. Even the most formidable market position can be vulnerable to technological disruptions, upstart competition, shifting capital flows, new regulatory regimes, political changes, and other facets of a chaotic and unpredictable business environment. As William P. Barnett showed in The Red Queen among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves (Princeton University Press, 2008), this turbulence can never level off into stability; as companies copy and outdo one another’s proficiencies, the game of business continually becomes more challenging. Rapid economic growth in emerging markets has made advantage even more transient, bringing billions of people into the global economy, along with hundreds of energetic new business competitors.
One might assume that the answer is to become completely resilient, morphing to match the changing demands of the market. But companies can’t, because of the second reality: Corporate identity is slow to change. The innate qualities of an organization that distinguish it from all others — its operational processes, culture, relationships, and distinctive capabilities — are built up gradually, decision by decision, and continually reinforced through organizational practices and conversations. Very few companies have thoroughly reinvented themselves, and those that have managed it have typically had to force many people out, including top executives, and to replace them with new recruits chosen for a different set of attitudes and skills. Even when leaders recognize the need for change or know that the company’s survival is at stake, this identity is difficult to shift; if no deliberate effort is made to refresh it, it can stagnate to the point where it erodes advantage from within. As writers such as Jim Collins, Clayton Christensen, and Donald Sull have noted, it’s all too easy for established companies to fall prey to complacency and hubris (Collins), entrenched customer relationships and disruptive technologies (Christensen), or inertia (Sull).
Yet although the “stickiness” of a company’s identity is typically regarded as a weakness, it’s also a great source of strength. No company can survive long, let alone distinguish itself, without a rich body of capabilities and a resonant corporate culture. Indeed, the fundamental enabler of strategy — the source of competitive advantage — is a distinctive, coherent corporate identity. This is the quality that attracts customers, investors, employees, and suppliers. It is grounded in internal capabilities (that is, the things your company can do with distinction) and in market realities (that is, the games in which your company chooses to play).
The yin and yang of strategic fad and fashion — the movement of business leadership from one trend to another over the past 50 years — has often led companies to make incoherent and ineffective moves. The answer is not to keep adopting new theories in hopes of finding the right answer, but to develop your own capabilities-driven strategy: your own theory of coherence for your business. How do you capture value, now and in the future, for your chosen customers? What are your most important capabilities, and how do they fit together? How do you align them with your portfolio of products and services? The more clearly and strongly you make these choices, the better your chances of creating a corporate identity that gives you the right to win in the long run. Not surprisingly, each of the four basic schools of thought in Exhibit 1 (position, execution, adaptation, and concentration) has something significant to offer business strategists, so long as they are adopted in an appropriately balanced way.

The Value of Position

According to Walter Kiechel, strategy became relatively formal in the 1960s for two reasons. The first was an increasing amount of available data on business costs, prices, and operational performance. The second reason was uncertainty, and the anxiety that went with it. The economic stability of the early 1960s dissolved into the turbulence of the 1970s and ’80s, striking different components of society with different degrees of prosperity and calamity. No company could ever be sure it would remain on top (even in established industries such as steel and automobiles), global economies were highly interconnected (although it wasn’t always quite clear how they might interact), and corporate decision making was increasingly constrained by fiercer capital markets and upstart technologies.
When intuitively obvious decisions fail, people yearn for better guidance. Thus, starting in the mid-1960s, the idea of strategic planning, with echoes of Napoleon, Carl von Clausewitz, and Sun Tzu, evolved into an irresistible business management fashion. In its pure form — as delineated by Kenneth Andrews and Igor Ansoff, the premier authorities on business strategy at that time — a strategy was an overarching plan for growth, usually written up in a formal document and endorsed by the CEO, aimed at creating an unassailable position for the company in the marketplace.
These early efforts by the position (or positioning) school assumed that the right to win would be held by companies that comprehensively analyzed all critical factors: external markets, internal capabilities, and the needs of society. Although Andrews said the goal should be a simple “informing idea” about the direction of the business, it inevitably became a complex checklist of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (the origin of the SWOT analysis still prevalent today). This was long before the invention of the spreadsheet program, so big companies hired armies of planning staffers to compile all this data into elaborate documents, which were debated in annual strategy sessions that became exercises in bureaucratic complexity. Only gradually did it become clear that the plans did not correlate with real-world performance or issues.
A breakthrough in the position school occurred in 1966 when Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), began to market services based on what he called the “experience curve.” Analyzing cost and price data across companies and industries, Henderson showed that as experience with operations led to greater proficiency, the capacity to produce increased and costs dropped. The phenomenon was hardly noticeable month by month, but every few years, capacity doubled and costs dropped 10 to 30 percent, so reliably that many companies could plan their investment cycles and competitive marketing accordingly. For example, Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) cut the prices of its semiconductor chips and electronic calculators every few months. Sales rose as customers switched to TI from competitors, and production costs then fell further, which allowed TI to drop prices even more. Even the billing procedures and advertising budgets became more efficient as those departments managed greater volumes.
To Henderson, the right to win went to companies that made the best use of the experience curve by holding the leading position in market share for their sectors. This meant emphasizing the value of some divisions over others, basing those judgments on the dynamics of each business’s customer base (Henderson was an early proponent of market segmentation) and on its competitive position. The famous growth-share matrix divided a company’s businesses into “stars” (high growth and market share), “dogs” (low growth and share), “question marks” (high growth, low share) and “cash cows” (low growth, high share), thus providing a clear rationale for reallocating investment. For instance, it was worth borrowing money to keep a star shining, because a star might end up dominating its market niche.
The experience curve and growth-share matrix rapidly became popular because they worked powerfully well — at first. But in practice, these tools had a serious flaw: As retroactive analyses of a company’s past success, they made it irresistible to continue that same behavior into the future, even when circumstances changed (for example, when competitors began to apply the same approach). This led many companies into counterproductive strategies. Some, including Texas Instruments, got caught up in ruthless price wars that contributed to the commoditization of their own products.
More generally, many business leaders became disenchanted with the idea of formal strategic planning. It was expensive, and it didn’t necessarily make companies profitable. For example, Ford and General Motors experienced losses of more than US$500 million in 1979 and 1980 — their first such losses in decades. In the aftermath of these and other sharp reversals, mainstream business leaders began to question the wisdom of the position school, and its claim on the right to win.

Execution Strikes Back

Those most annoyed by the position school tended to be in production and operations. No wonder, then, that the first great contrary reaction came from operations; specifically, from the Harvard Business School’s (HBS) operations management department, which had been gradually losing status to finance. Two members of the faculty found themselves in Vevey, Switzerland, during the summer of 1979: William Abernathy, the HBS expert on auto manufacturing, and Robert Hayes, known for his studies of assembly lines. Researching the differences between European and U.S. multinationals, Hayes visited a small machine tool manufacturer in southern Germany. Sophisticated Americans barely understood computer-aided manufacturing software, but this firm of 40 people was using it on a daily basis, and producing custom-made tools. Other plants in Germany, Switzerland, France, and even eastern Europe were using machine tools in ways that the Americans couldn’t match.
At a seminar that summer, a European businessman asked Hayes why American productivity had declined so much during the past 10 years. Hayes hauled out the standard answers: organized labor, government regulations, the oil crisis, and the attitudes of the younger generation (which, at the time, meant the baby boomers). The attendees looked at him with polite amusement. “We have all those factors here,” one said, “and our productivity is increasing.”
Confused and shaken, Hayes began taking regular hikes and having long conversations with Abernathy, who had just arrived in Vevey and saw similar stagnation in the U.S. auto industry. Only one explanation made sense to them: The reliance on market share and financial growth as strategic objectives was crippling U.S. industry. For example, many companies had cut back any initiative that didn’t seem to guarantee rapid returns, and the entire U.S. economy was suffering as a result.
Abernathy and Hayes wrote up this conclusion in an article for the Harvard Business Review (HBR) called “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” published in July/August 1980. It is still one of the magazine’s most requested reprints, and one of the most controversial articles in its history. They had introduced another school of strategic thought, based on the idea that the right to win came from execution and operational excellence: the development and deployment of better practices, processes, technologies, and products.
The execution message was bolstered by companies such as General Electric and Motorola, which provided influential examples of operations-oriented strategies with their reliance on executive training and such practices as Six Sigma.
Operational excellence was also a basic tenet of the quality movement — the continuous improvement practices that were developed at the Toyota Motor Corporation and a few other Japanese companies in the 1950s and ’60s and are now generally known as lean management. Of the many people associated with the quality movement, including Toyota’s influential chief scientist Taiichi Ohno, the most significant for corporate strategy was W. Edwards Deming. Deming was an American statistician born in 1900. He began consulting regularly in Japan just after World War II, helping Japanese companies develop their production systems. Ignored in the West at first, he became prominent in the United States after 1980, and actively taught and consulted with many of the world’s leading companies until his death in 1993. Deming saw his methods as critical for escaping economic malaise (his most prominent book was titled Out of the Crisis [MIT Press, 1986]). In his view, the right to win was held by companies that honed and refined their day-to-day processes and practices, eliminating waste, training people throughout the company to use statistical methods, and cultivating the intrinsic “joy in work” that people feel when they are truly engaged in their jobs.
Although the execution school would be frequently challenged, it continued to gain influence through the early 1990s — especially after it was adapted by Michael Hammer, an MIT computer science professor, into an approach called “reengineering.” According to Hammer, the right to win went to companies that looked freshly at all their processes, as if redesigning them from scratch. Unfortunately, many companies used reengineering as a launching pad for across-the-board layoffs that left them weaker, and operational excellence couldn’t compete with the exuberance of the high-tech bubble. By the end of the 1990s, execution-based strategy had been largely relegated to the production side of the business.
The idea of building value through managerial methods returned to strategic relevance after the dot-com bubble burst. Its return was symbolized by the business bestseller Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by strategy expert Ram Charan and then Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy, a well-known GE alumnus (with Charles Burck; Crown Business, 2002). Many leaders now understood, through experience, both the value of improving execution and its challenges. It generally required major changes in managerial and employee behavior. As BCG strategist George Stalk complained to Walter Kiechel, “That was a lot more difficult than just ‘buying a concept off a shelf.’”

Michael Porter’s Advantage

The other major limit of the execution school was best articulated by HBS professor Michael Porter — probably the most influential thinker on corporate strategy in the institution’s history, and a source of new vitality for the position school. In his early publications, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Porter brought positioning to a level of unprecedented sophistication. He recast the turbulence of a company’s business environment into a “value chain” and “five forces” (competitors, customers, suppliers, aspiring entrants, and substitute offerings): two frameworks that could be used to analyze the value potential and competitive intensity of any business.
Then, in his flagship HBR article called “What Is Strategy?” (November/December 1996) Porter pointed out that operational excellence could guarantee competitive advantage for only a limited time. After that, it too would lead to diminishing returns as other companies caught up. (Indeed, most observers believe that Ford, GM, and other Western automobile manufacturers have done exactly that between 1980 and 2010; it may have taken them 30 years, but the quality and resale value of their motor vehicles is, as a whole, rising to meet that of Toyota and Honda.)
To Porter, execution-oriented ideas like reengineering, benchmarking, outsourcing, and change management all had the same strategic limit. They all led to better operations, but ignored the question of which businesses to operate in the first place. Porter argued for picking industries or markets where either overall conditions were favorable — where most companies were relatively weak, suppliers had relatively little clout, and aspiring entrants were few — or where a company could differentiate itself. In “What Is Strategy?” Porter used Southwest Airlines Company as an example of differentiation in a relatively unattractive industry. Southwest’s market power came from the choice not to follow the spoke-and-hub routing model of other airlines, but to offer “a unique and valuable strategic position” — flying only direct routes, with one type of aircraft, using automated ticketing and limited services (for example, no assigned seats). These and other strategic choices allowed the airline to operate a different type of flying business, one that could offer attractive prices and convenience even when compared with travel by bus, train, or car. Sure, operational excellence was involved: Southwest had perfected fast turnarounds and friendly customer service. But the core strategic decision was the pursuit of simplicity through a clear market strategy.
The position school became a major driver of the resurgence of corporate competitiveness in the West during the 1980s and ’90s. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne took the position argument to its extreme with Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). Big companies, they advised, should look for new upstart positions themselves, in places where there were no competitors already, breaking out of conventional ways of looking at their industry. The popularity of that approach demonstrated the pressure that business leaders felt to break free of established practices and find a niche that they could dominate with first-mover advantage.
The limits of the position school became evident in the 1990s and 2000s. Although Michael Porter took pains to explain that industry structures can change and can be shaped by the actions of leading companies, he was interpreted as saying that some industries are innately good and others are irredeemably bad. To many corporate leaders in tough businesses, or in highly regulated industries like electric power generation, there was no real advantage to developing distinctive capabilities or facility with execution. Some companies tried to escape by entering new businesses where they had no distinctive capabilities, “blue oceans” where they didn’t know how to swim. These efforts generally failed. And as the 2000s unfolded, companies with enviable market positions, such as Microsoft, also saw their advantage fade when new competitors, such as Google, emerged. This didn’t disprove Porter’s hypothesis, but it gave others an opening to criticize his thinking.

Adaptation and Experimentation

Starting in the 1990s, another group of strategy thinkers provided an alternative to the position and execution schools. This was the idea of strategy as perpetual adaptation, best represented by Henry Mintzberg, professor of management studies at McGill University. In his history The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners (Free Press, 1994), Mintzberg dismissed the position school (which he called the design school) as formulaic. He acknowledged that execution was important, and much of his work was dedicated to analyzing what managers did in practice, but, like Porter, he felt execution was insufficient for success. His strategic approach centered on finding a more creative, experimental approach to executive decision making.
Thus, instead of analysis and planning, executives in the adaptation school (or, as Mintzberg called it, the learning school) sought to gain the right to win by experimenting with new directions. In Mintzberg’s words, they “let a thousand strategic flowers bloom…[using] an insightful style, to detect the patterns of success in these gardens of strategic flowers, rather than a cerebral style that favors analytical techniques to develop strategies in a hothouse.”
Adaptation has helped many companies; it’s been the source, for example, of the vitality of the Chinese manufacturing industry. It’s also been the most central guiding theme of Tom Peters’s work. The companies applauded by Peters — starting with his seminal business bestseller, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (with Robert Waterman; Harper & Row, 1982) — have varied enormously in their industries, approaches, and philosophies, but they all share a willingness to experiment with new ideas and directions, discard those that won’t work, and adjust their efforts to meet new challenges.
But the adaptation school is also seriously limited, because its freewheeling nature tends to lead to incoherence. A multitude of products and services that all have different capability needs and different market positions cannot possibly be brought into sync. The more diverse a company’s efforts become, the more it costs to develop and apply the advantaged capabilities they need. Letting a thousand flowers bloom can lead to a field full of weeds — and to businesses that can’t match the expertise and resources of more focused, coherent competitors.

Concentration at the Core

Hence the appeal of the fourth group of strategy thinkers — the concentration school. Its forerunners were Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, authors of Competing for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), who argued that the most effective companies owed their success to a select set of “core competencies”: These were the bedrock skills and technological capabilities (such as new forms of hardware, software, systems, biotechnology, and financial engineering) that allowed companies to compete in distinctive ways. Companies that focused on these, and used them to develop a long-range “strategic intent,” would claim the right to win.
Chris Zook of Bain & Company, drawing on his firm’s experience with private equity, has been the most prominent recent exponent of this school. In his book Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times (2001, with James Allen; Harvard Business Press, 2010), he argues that the right to win tends to accrue to companies that stick to their core businesses and find new ways to exploit them for growth and value. This means differentiating a company by starting with its central capabilities: Enterprise, Dollar/Thrifty, and Avis all prospered by focusing on, respectively, rentals for people with car repairs, vacationers, and business travelers.
However, in practice, the concentration strategy often becomes a way of holding on to old approaches, even when they become outdated. Many companies (and private equity firms) translate this strategy into slash-and-burn retrenchment. They cut costs and minimize investments in R&D and marketing to create a pared-down company that produces more profits at first, but that can’t sustain the growth required for a healthy bottom line. When they seek to grow, it’s through “adjacencies”: products or services that seem related to their existing core businesses. But many adjacencies are less profitable than they were expected to be, in part because they may require very different capabilities — and in part because the truly successful game-changing leaps, like Apple’s into consumer media or Tata’s into the inexpensive Nano automobile, can’t be managed from a concentration strategy alone.

Strategy as a Way of Life

It’s important to note that most of the thinkers who introduced these strategies to business leaders saw the challenges and limits of their approaches, and even warned against misapplying them. But businesspeople misapplied them nonetheless. Each theory thus backfired, and created opportunities for the next.
How can your company gain the most from considering all these theories of the right to win? Only by stepping back, away from any particular answer, to look at your company’s identity as a whole, encompassing the way you expect to compete, the capabilities with which you will compete, and the portfolio decisions that fit. In fact, that’s exactly what happens with the packaged-foods company described at the beginning of this article.
The CEO’s question about the right to win has sparked many levels of discussion. For several more days, spread over a few weeks, the executive team talks through its three proposed strategies in detail: the estimated market value of each, the risks involved, and the capabilities required. All three strategies have roughly the same potential for increasing enterprise value, but the differences among them become clear when the functional leaders speak.
For example, the head of operations explains that the three strategies would require completely different investments. Becoming an innovator would mean configuring a flexible value chain to launch new products rapidly and economically. The closer-to-customers option would mean selling more food at different temperatures: some frozen, some fresh. It would also mean building a more direct, collaborative relationship between operations and R&D. And the category transformation strategy would require new process technologies, economies of scale, and deftly managed acquisitions.
The head of marketing and sales has a similar presentation. As an innovator, the company would focus advertising and promotion on new products, while ensuring rapid, widespread retail distribution. Being a solutions provider would move the company directly into engagement with consumers, through websites, social media, and better in-store displays. As a category leader, the company would seek to own the grocery shelf through “sharp pencil” tactics (in other words, tactics tailored to each brand and geographic region) for pricing, promotion, and merchandising.
The company executives ultimately settle on the category leader strategy. It fits best with the capabilities that they already have. Another company, even with the same market dynamics, might choose differently — appropriately so, because of very different capabilities and customs.
A capabilities-driven strategy process, like this one, takes into account “market back” aspirations (the position the leaders want to hold) and “capabilities forward” concerns (the company’s ability to deliver). In the course of discussion, ideas from all four schools of thought come forward: ideas about holding an unassailable position, executing with new capabilities, adapting rapidly to competitive pressures, and focusing on the core business as a platform for growth. It takes time to complete this process, and it is very difficult and stressful at times, but the company gains, in the end, from a far higher level of coherence.
It’s taken 50 years for the field of business strategy to reach the point at which many companies can conduct this kind of conversation effectively. Most companies have relied on business strategists for strategic answers. But now we see that we have to generate our own answers — our own theory of the right to win for each company, with its unique identity and circumstances — and that we have the tools to do so. Given the pressures that business continues to face, this leap in knowledge is coming just in time. 

The Sirens of CPG Strategy
by Steffen Lauster

Some strategic concepts, if they’re held as sacrosanct, can lead an entire industry in the wrong direction. Something of that sort has happened during the past two decades in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. Two of the most influential strategy ideas are so widely held, so intuitively appealing, and so apparently true in practice that they are very hard to give up. Yet they can also be quite dangerous to follow.
The first of these misleading ideas is that “bigger is better.” Since the 1980s, CPG companies have tried hard to expand. The conventional wisdom said that the best shareholder returns would accrue to companies with huge brands and the scale to compete in developing markets. The second idea is that “consolidation is inevitable.” For years, experts have predicted that most consumer packaged goods segments would end up like carbonated beverages, shaving products, and disposable diapers — dominated by just two or three big players that took advantage of their scale to acquire or crowd out rivals, while a handful of niche players battled over the scraps.
Recent studies conducted by Booz & Company of total shareholder return among CPG companies show that both of these ideas are, at best, incomplete. Companies that follow them end up sacrificing performance. To be sure, there are categories where scale matters, where one or two players dominate. But many food and consumer products sectors are fragmenting instead, with room for many profitable entrants. In coffee, ready-to-eat meals, shampoos, and pasta sauces, for example, there are more small companies than there used to be; mass and price don’t matter as much as perceived quality. In the New York area, jars of Rao’s Homemade marinara sauce (the same sauce served in the famous Rao’s restaurant of East Harlem) are flying off the shelves.
These days, the best-performing consumer products companies — whether large or small — are those with the greatest coherence. Their market strategy, capabilities system, and product lineup all fit together. They invest their capital and attention in just three to six differentiated capabilities, supporting all the products they offer. This gives them a level of efficiency and effectiveness that most of their competitors can’t match.
In the end, the problem with strategy concepts is not that they’re wrong; they are, in fact, often right. But they are not universal. Beware any strategic idea that most other companies find beguiling. The right strategic destination is different for every company, even in a mature industry like consumer packaged goods.

Steffen Lauster is a partner with Booz & Company based in Cleveland.

Reprint No. 10407

Author Profiles:

• Cesare Mainardi is the managing director of Booz & Company’s North American business and a member of the firm’s executive committee. He is coauthor, with Paul Leinwand, of The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2010).
• Art Kleiner is the editor-in-chief of strategy+business and the author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2008).
• Disclosure: At least four people named in this article have been contributors to s+b: Ram Charan, Walter Kiechel, Henry Mintzberg, and C.K. Prahalad. Others named in the article have had associations with s+b staff members, with Booz & Company, or with its competitors. Where we assess individuals’ contributions and impact, we have tried to do so independent of any such associations.

Illustration by Philippe Lardy

Faced with economic headwinds, many global corporations are struggling to grow their businesses profitably. In the consumer packaged goods business, for example, the worldwide recession has hurt premium brands as consumers have traded down to cheaper brands, private labels, or generics. In the retailing business, same-store sales are flat or declining for numerous companies. Meanwhile, many business leaders continue to seek growth by extending their existing product lines and brands, as well as by entering new geographic regions. After all, growth is supposed to be about “more” — more products on the shelf, more categories, more brands, and more markets.
However, this approach is exactly the opposite of what business leaders should do to drive increased revenues and profits. A typical “growth through more” strategy diffuses the organization’s efforts. It increases the complexity of the organization and its operations. We have found that “growth through less,” or more precisely “growth through focus,” is the best prescription for growth, regardless of the economic environment. This conclusion is based on our own experience in three well-known companies — Kraft Foods, Unilever, and Fonterra Brands (a dairy products business based in New Zealand) — on three continents over 10 years. In all three cases, a deliberate strategy of focusing on a few markets, brands, and categories produced impressive revenue and profit expansion. We have learned that seemingly mature businesses can be energized by making fewer but larger bets and by focusing relentlessly on executing a simple but powerful vision.
Growth through focus is not as easy as choosing what strategic bets to make. Rather, it requires the leadership team to follow a systematic approach that spans everything from strategy and vision to execution and measurement. We propose a framework that consists of seven steps that an organization must go through in its quest for growth through focus. Our framework is grounded in three key ideas: focus in strategy, simplicity in communication, and empowerment in execution………

Growth and the Winemaker’s Logic

To understand the logic behind growth through focus, consider what winemakers know about getting the best out of grapevines. Grapevines are very vigorous. With abundant water and nutrients in the soil, they tend to grow into large, leafy plants. However, overly vigorous vines produce lower-quality wine and smaller crops. When growing conditions are too rich, grapevines grow more leaves and become tangled. Leaves take nutrients away from grapes, which contain the seeds for future growth, and create shade, which inhibits ripening. To improve the quality of grapes, winemakers carefully prune grapevines and remove excess bunches of grapes to reduce yields. The remaining bunches ripen more fully and ultimately produce more concentrated wine.

Many companies, in effect, behave like inattentive vintners. Growth initiatives are often overstimulated with money and leadership attention. The result is lots of activity and a large number of growth projects, and this activity often does not correlate with outcomes. Quantity does not mean quality. To improve the quality of growth, business leaders need to cut back on marginal products, brands, and markets so that they have a better chance of winning in their chosen areas of focus.
Following the winemaker’s logic, company leaders must overturn conventional thinking about how to manage the organization, processes, and people for growth. (See the exhibit.) For example, a conventional core belief about growth is that companies need to extend their product lines and brands and to expand their categories and markets. Leaders hope that the more arrows they have in their quiver and the more targets they have to shoot at, the more bull’s-eyes they will score. But in reality, growth often comes from fewer but stronger arrows aimed at fewer targets. The engines of growth are focus (fewer brands, fewer categories, and fewer markets) and simplicity (simple vision, simplified execution, and simpler organizational designs). Conventional thinking also assumes that although complexity adds cost and makes the organization less agile, it is inevitable in a large global company. But complexity is an avoidable enemy of growth if you know what you are doing.
The logic of growth through focus also suggests a very different view on planning and leadership. Many companies tend to make long-term strategic plans, but they often have a short attention span in execution. CEOs and business leaders get seduced by doing something new and different well before the strategy has had time to play out. We recommend the reverse: Plan quickly and then stay the course for a long time, as long as five years. Leaders should resist the temptation to change strategies too often.

Seven Steps in Growth through Focus

Our experience suggests that growth through focus requires the organization to progress systematically through a set of seven steps: discovery, strategy, vision, people, execution, organization, and metrics. Taken together, they represent a powerful formula for driving profitable growth.

1. Discovery: Figure Out What Works

Science fiction author William Gibson observed, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” And so it is with excellence. All large companies have pockets of excellent growth performance. The first step in the growth journey is to discover what is working well and where the company is already winning. These pockets of excellence help identify focus areas for growth. An effective way to uncover what works is to conduct a series of workshops with the top leaders from the company.
At Unilever’s Lipton beverages business, the process began at Colworth House, the company’s R&D center in the United Kingdom. The top 100 leaders of Unilever beverages from around the world were invited to a workshop in 2000, whose agenda was to build upon what was working well in specific markets and to scale the success across other geographies. One year later, this was followed by a “10 in 10” workshop in Brussels to discuss how to achieve sales of US$10 billion within 10 years in these markets and to imagine the future of Lipton as seen through the eyes of Unilever’s major competitors.
In Kraft Foods’ international business, the growth process kicked off in 2007 with seven workshops in six locations around the world, each including about 20 of the company’s regional business leaders. The agenda was open-ended, with the top leaders taking a backseat to prevent their rank from impeding the flow of ideas and insights. An external facilitator ensured that collective experience was gathered objectively. The workshops focused on what worked rather than on what did not work, because it is easier to build on what is working than to fix what isn’t working. To ensure a customer focus, workshops included extensive immersion with consumers and customers to provide insights into behavior, needs, and problems. This kind of immersion generates insights in ways that quantitative market research never can.
A few themes began to emerge from the workshops. Kraft Foods had excellent people, but their insights and ideas had been getting lost because of geographic dispersion, and their potential was not being fully realized. The company’s iconic brands had been built over many years, but several were underperforming. The planning process had tended to focus internally instead of externally, and had looked backward rather than forward. There was a lot of emphasis on analyzing what happened instead of figuring out what needed to be done. The conclusion was clear. The company urgently needed to establish clear priorities and accountability at a global, regional, and local level.
At the outset, the discovery process should be inclusive and democratic. It is important to involve key stakeholders within the company, particularly those who can make a valuable contribution and those who have the influence to get the masses of employees behind them. In addition, great insights often come from engaging with suppliers, creative and media agencies, and consultants who have worked with the company for a long time. On the other end of the spectrum, it is also important to listen to people who push back — and to manage dissent. As the process goes on and the framework and vision are agreed upon, debate on the strategic framework should cease and the emphasis should switch to execution.

2. Strategy: Focus through Lenses

The discovery process produces a set of success themes. In the second step, these themes need to be clustered and prioritized to define the focused bets that the company should make. Narrowing the focus is essential in order to concentrate resources on areas where the company has the best chances of winning. To take an analogy from photography, sharpening the focus on an object requires a telephoto lens that homes in on the subject while de-emphasizing background objects. Similarly, we have found that strategic focus requires lenses through which a company can look at its businesses. Lenses can be categories that the company is doing well in, brands that are performing well, geographies that are doing a stellar job, and platforms (like wellness or bone health in healthcare) that can serve to unify the company’s products and brands.
Consider the experience at Fonterra Brands. Through the discovery process, the company used two lenses — a product platform and a distribution channel. Using the platform lens, Fonterra identified osteoporosis as a key platform to bet on, based on its expertise in bone-health products. To pursue leadership on this platform, Fonterra entered into a partnership with GE Healthcare’s Lunar business to tackle the growing global health problem of osteoporosis using Fonterra’s Anlene bone-health products and GE Healthcare’s bone density technology. The partnership’s first initiative was the Anlene Bone Health Check, which provided free bone density screenings to millions of people in nine countries in Asia.
Using the second lens, Fonterra bet on the food-service channel as a key to its future growth. The outcome was a focused business called Fonterra Foodservices, which offers a complete suite of dairy products and tailored solutions for food-service professionals. Focusing through the distribution channel lens led to the strategy of creating a single “cow to customer” integrated business.
During the focusing process, each lens may produce several possible opportunities. These opportunities should be prioritized according to two criteria: the expected impact of the initiatives and the effort required. This exercise should result in a one-page preliminary plan that lists priorities for each lens. This preliminary plan should then go through several rounds of iteration with the input of key stakeholders. To improve the framework’s odds of adoption, it is important to involve as many of these stakeholders as possible in “owning” the outcome.
Once you find out what works, you can focus on it and scale the success to other markets, products, and brands. In the Unilever workshops, the company discovered that Lipton Portugal and Lipton Arabia were performing consistently well over time. Diving deeper into the reasons for this standout performance, the company found an interesting theme. In both markets, Lipton had been successful because it competed in the broad beverages market rather than limiting itself to the tea category. Further, in these markets, Lipton had done an excellent job of adapting its products to local tastes. For instance, Portugal had a successful iced tea business, whereas Arabia represented a successful hot tea market, despite the fact that Arabian countries have hot climates. The idea of taking a broader view of the business while remaining relevant to local tastes could be applied to Lipton’s other markets and categories.

3. Vision: Find a Simple Hook

Once the focus areas have been defined, the findings need to be summarized in a compelling yet simple vision. The vision serves as a rallying cry for the organization to align its efforts behind a clearly understood goal. Too frequently, the business strategies of large corporations are poorly understood outside the corporate headquarters and beyond the senior leadership of the company. To get everyone in the organization behind the strategy, it is vital to communicate the strategy across all levels and functions in the organization. This is the role that the vision plays.
To make the vision compelling yet easy to understand, we recommend creating a “hook.” The hook should be kept consistent over time and across customer touch points. It can be a color, a number, an acronym, a phrase, or a symbol. At Fonterra, the rallying cries were “Winning through Brands” and “Dairy for Life.” The vision embodied two themes: farmers’ pride (Fonterra is a cooperative owned by farmers) and the company’s emphasis on natural products, captured through the blue and green color of the company’s logo and merchandising. At Kraft International, the vision was expressed in numbers — “the 5-10-10 strategy,” which meant winning by focusing on five categories, 10 brands, and 10 markets. At Lipton, the vision was “Paint the World Yellow with Lipton.” The brand’s characteristic color signified brightness and sunshine, and stood for a broader Lipton beverage experience than just a cup of tea.
Once a vision is chosen, it needs to be launched with a bang through a seminal event designed to inspire the team. For Kraft Foods’ international business, the top 100 leaders were brought together on the 99th floor of the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago in May 2007. The event kicked off with awards for teams around the world that recognized great work in various categories. Awards can set a positive tone, instill a can-do attitude, and make people feel like winners. At Lipton, the kickoff event was held at Colworth House, the 18th-century mansion at Colworth Science Park, where everything was painted yellow — including the lawn in front of the building. The theme “Paint the World Yellow with Lipton” was brought to life through winning stories from successful markets.
In communicating the vision, pictures are often worth a thousand words or PowerPoint slides. Simple visuals that depict the “from–to” journey can serve as powerful communication tools. Lipton used two visuals to bring the transformation journey to life — a picture of Audrey Hepburn, representing the Lipton brand as it was (classic, aristocratic, reserved), and a picture of Cameron Diaz, representing the new Lipton (bright, sunny, vibrant).

4. People: Unleash the Potential

Once the vision and strategy have been defined and powerfully communicated, the next step is to find the right people and to place disproportionate resources in their hands. The right people need to be placed in all functions — supply chain, R&D, marketing and sales — to ensure that you have the skills to win. Selecting those people requires a rigorous process of matching skills with the needs of the business. For instance, if the strategy involves focusing on a specific channel or set of brands, you need to find people who have expertise in the relevant channels and brands and put them in charge.
In Kraft Foods’ international business, significant changes were made in the top leadership. Less than two years after launching the transformation initiative, two-thirds of the top 30 leaders were new to their roles. Many of the new leaders came from within Kraft Foods. Some were hired externally, and some came from the successful acquisition of Groupe Danone’s biscuit business in November 2007. Similarly, at Lipton, a number of managers were hired from leading companies in the beverage industry (Coke, Pepsi, Schweppes) to augment the traditional grocery skills within Unilever.
Once new leaders are appointed, they need to be given the freedom to operate within the strategic framework so that their potential can be truly unleashed. Leaders should be challenged to act as entrepreneurs within large companies that have traditionally been perceived as process-driven and bureaucratic. In our experience, the biggest enemy of creativity and imagination in large companies is the budget. Resource constraints, real or perceived, limit the imagination of business leaders and prevent them from thinking creatively. To liberate people from these constraints, we recommend a counterintuitive approach: Give people huge targets and empower them with virtually unlimited resources. The targets should represent a quantum leap from historical results. Although it may seem that unlimited resources would encourage profligate spending, business leaders have a strong incentive to spend wisely, because they do need to deliver profits and margins, not just revenue increases. When leaders are asked to act like owners, they behave with an amazing sense of responsibility and often arrive at sensible trade-offs among risks, rewards, and resources. It is important that leaders not be penalized for failure unless they consistently fail to learn from experience.
Unleashing the potential of people also involves identifying and nurturing tomorrow’s growth leaders. During Kraft Foods’ transformation journey, a formal program called the Winners’ Circle was created to recognize and reward performance and potential in the international business. This program was designed after benchmarking against some of the world’s best companies. Rising stars from around the globe were nominated through a rigorous selection process, and the Winners’ Circle members were inducted into a leadership program designed to build their capabilities. Today, their career progress is carefully monitored and they are selected for challenging growth assignments across the company. The program has generated tremendous buzz within Kraft Foods because of its richness and depth.

5. Execution: Clarify and Delegate

With the discovery, strategy, vision, and people in place, the next challenge is execution. This is the most important step in the journey, and it is also the most difficult. Execution has two key elements. First, everyone needs to be clear about who will do what, to avoid ambiguity about roles and responsibilities. Second, decision making needs to be moved closer to customers and consumers so that the people responsible for results have the operating freedom they need. Most organizations have a mistaken conviction that the leadership team has superior knowledge on every subject. This belief conditions managers to assume that success lies in pleasing the leadership team rather than in winning in the market.
Kraft Foods found that the organization had become such a complex matrix that accountability was fragmented across functions, markets, and business units, yet decision making had become highly centralized. Decisions such as product pricing were being made at corporate headquarters, which took longer and excluded the rich knowledge and context of local markets. Even such routine decisions as the pricing of coffee in Germany were made at the corporate headquarters in Northfield, Ill.! This was changed to give business leaders the freedom to make decisions that would allow them to compete effectively in their markets. The role of corporate headquarters was made more strategic and less operational. Certain decisions involving food safety and purchasing were still kept centralized because they had to be made on a large scale, as opposed to those that demanded intimacy with local consumers and customers. These changes have had a profound effect in making the organization more nimble.
To accelerate execution, we recommend a strong bias for action. Business leaders should demand a dramatic reduction in internal documents and meetings. In our experience, too many meetings and documents foster analysis paralysis, promote internal focus versus external focus, and emphasize the past over the future. Much of the documentation is generated to please senior management, with endless hours spent on “wordsmithing” and editing. For the most part, we suggest a “no PowerPoint” policy in presentations; meetings are often far more productive if they focus on discussion based on pre-reading. Numbers may help tell the story, but too often, we find that numbers become the story and the big picture gets lost.

6. Organization: Build Collaborative Networks

Growth initiatives rarely fit within organizational silos of function, geography, and business unit. Rather, they need to be managed by creating communities and networks across the company, formal as well as informal. At Kraft Foods, certain networks, such as R&D, have always been strong. However, as business units were pushed to take P&L responsibility, it was important to set up collaborative networks to ensure that the best people with the best ideas were connected to leverage expertise and scale. Kraft Foods set up global category teams consisting of executives drawn from different functions and geographies to manage global brands, innovation, and supply chains across markets. Each team follows the approach that works best for its brand or category in terms of what needs to be done by whom, globally or locally.
Consider the example of Oreo cookies, one of Kraft Foods’ billion-dollar brands. Oreo was a strong brand in the United States but had historically been weak in the rest of the world. One reason was the assumption that what was good for Oreo in the U.S. was also good in China, the U.K., and elsewhere. The company learned from experience that this was not the case. To grow the brand in China, Oreo cookies were made less sweet to suit local consumer tastes. Oreo packages were made smaller, and new forms, like wafers, were introduced. Heavy emphasis was placed on local promotions and on-the-ground marketing activities unique to China. This localization, however, was carried out within the global brand positioning for Oreo. After implementation of the new strategy, Oreo became the market leader in China, and the Oreo business outside the U.S. began growing about 30 percent per year. Through the global category teams, Kraft Foods now has an energized, highly motivated community of employees around the world who sleep and dream Oreo.
This approach of matching skills with priorities and connecting communities to get the best mix of global and local ideas, within a clearly defined strategy, has a powerful effect in leveraging scale and expertise.

7. Metrics: Manage Numbers and Tell Stories

As the execution and organization processes get under way, it is important to keep score. Scorecards should be objective, and they should be kept simple. Overly complex metrics take attention away from the measures that really matter and can obfuscate execution priorities. At Kraft Foods, Chairman and CEO Irene Rosenfeld asked that the businesses create a one-page scorecard system that included three key measures — sales, profits, and cash flow. These three measures were made the basis for bonuses to all employees. This simple scorecard dramatically reduced reporting complexity and created clear accountability for results. Kraft Foods’ international business also uses a single-page scorecard to monitor the progress of the 5-10-10 strategy. Simplicity begets focus, because everyone knows what numbers the executives are looking at.
Managing growth requires a focus on numbers, but numbers alone are not enough. Storytelling is a powerful tool for propagating the culture of winning in the organization. A conscious effort should be made to write up and disseminate success stories from around the world. Leadership should make it a point at every large internal meeting to put successful people on the stage to share their stories with their colleagues. Success stories become part of the culture, and successful people become heroes in the eyes of their peers and managers. Moreover, highlighting the achievements of successful teams creates “positive shame”; the teams that are not on the stage feel strong peer pressure. This positive pressure is far more effective than the “negative shame” that would be created if the less-successful teams were berated in reviews.

Avoiding the Traps

With any transformation initiative, there are pitfalls to avoid and hurdles to overcome on the way to success. Here are a few to keep in mind in implementing growth through focus.
One common pitfall is to seek to build scale before fixing underlying problems. In choosing the markets and categories to focus on, for example, it is easy to get seduced by the size of the opportunity. Most large companies covet the hundreds of millions of consumers in emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil. And they quote the minuscule per capita consumption of their products as an indicator of vast untapped potential. To convert potential into actual revenues and profits, however, you first need a business model that works. You must have the distribution reach, the supply chain, the manufacturing capabilities, and the right products before you can scale the business. Kraft Foods was in China for many years and had set ambitious targets that it did not achieve. In reality, the model was not working and the business was losing money. Scaling up the model simply made things worse. To fix this problem, Kraft Foods redesigned its business model, integrated its business with the acquired Danone biscuits unit, and got the appropriate talent on the ground. Only then did Kraft Foods’ business in China begin to grow and make money.
Another potential trap in implementing growth through focus is neglecting or mismanaging the parts of the business that do not fall within the core focus areas. This is the “tail” of your business — products, brands, categories, and markets that do not make it to the priority list. Consider, for example, the brand portfolio. Most large companies have hundreds of brands, but only a few will make it to the priority list. So what should you do with the rest? Simply cutting off the tail can be disastrous, because the decline of the tail is often faster than the growth of the core. Further, the non-core businesses often have fixed costs that are linked to the core businesses. Finally, cutting and divesting can have a huge demoralizing effect, because people often have strong emotional ties to some of these businesses.
What you need is a clear plan to manage the tail. We find it helpful to cluster the non-core businesses into two buckets — “milk or divest” and “local jewels.” The two buckets need very different management approaches. The first category includes businesses that do not make money and have no hope of making money, despite repeated promises of future turnarounds. These need to be divested over a defined time frame. Fonterra Brands exited markets such as Mexico and Egypt where the business had not performed well for some time, which freed valuable resources that could be redeployed to grow the core businesses. Local jewels are successful local businesses that can be retained in the portfolio but managed at arm’s length by local teams, leaving the global teams to focus on the core businesses. At Kraft Foods, the company found a number of such jewels that are now managed locally, but still help to provide scale in manufacturing and distribution. These businesses should be left to determine their own destiny but should be held accountable for revenues, margins, and cash flow.
Too often, when companies rationalize and focus, they slash expenses across the board. Two areas that take the brunt of cost cutting are people-related expenses (recruitment, training, travel) and brand advertising. However, talent and brands are the two most valuable assets for driving growth. We recommend increasing investments in hiring and developing talent, even ahead of the company’s needs. We also recommend increasing investments in building brands. The good news is that the growth-through-focus approach yields significant cost savings through elimination of management layers, reduction of overhead, and elimination of marginal businesses. Focus frees up resources that can be used to invest in the future.
Once a strategic direction has been established, it is important to stay the course until the strategy has been fully implemented. We find that large companies suffer from “corporate attention deficit disorder” — they tend to search for new strategies every few years, particularly after a change in leadership. But growth through focus requires patience and perseverance. In our experience, the transformation process takes as long as five years to play out. Leaders should resist the temptation to go for the “next big thing” in strategy peddled by management consulting firms and management gurus. Change for the sake of change merely produces a loss of momentum.
Finally, keeping a positive tone is vital to the success of growth through focus. It is very easy to slip into a negative spiral that can destroy morale and derail the transformation initiative. Although you do need to face the facts and make the difficult decisions, it is important to keep a positive tone and to promote a can-do attitude among employees. The energy that comes from winning is infectious. It inspires people to achieve goals that they have never before considered possible. Leaders should act as evangelists and cheerleaders, spreading the positive energy and making sure the teams are having fun at winning.
The sun generates a tremendous amount of energy, but it gives us only a warm glow. By contrast, a laser beam that uses a few kilowatts of energy can cut through metal. Such is the power of focus. If you are running a large global business with a big portfolio of brands, products, and markets, adding to your portfolio is likely to create more complexity than growth. To win in your businesses, you must harness the power of focus. By following the seven steps in our blueprint, business leaders can drive profitable growth even in difficult economic times. 

Building Scale for Focus: A Tale of Two Acquisitions

Growth through focus involves a reduction in the number of products, categories, brands, and markets that the company should focus on. But it also demands an increase in the scale of the businesses that the company chooses to focus on. Scale can be generated by building on the brand and product assets that the company has in its portfolio through organic growth. However, organic growth may not be enough to get to the required scale, particularly when the company is betting on markets or categories in which it is not a market leader. Further, in some emerging markets, building distribution networks from scratch is a Herculean task. This is where acquisitions play an important role in the growth-through-focus approach. They can help the company acquire scale in its chosen domains. The acquisition strategy should be driven by the focus strategy, and a clear logic should link the acquisition to the strategic framework for growth.
Consider Kraft Foods. The company had chosen biscuits and chocolates as two of the categories it wanted to focus on. It had also determined that markets like India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico would be important for the company in the future. However, it lacked the scale, the brands, and the distribution networks it needed to compete globally in these categories and these markets.
Using this focus strategy, Kraft Foods identified two key acquisitions — the global biscuit business of Groupe Danone and Cadbury PLC, the U.K.-based confectionery company. In November 2007, Kraft Foods acquired the global biscuit business of Groupe Danone for US$7.8 billion. After this acquisition, Kraft Foods’ biscuits business accounted for 20 percent of the company’s revenue and catapulted Kraft Foods into the leading position in this category across the world. More importantly, it gave Kraft Foods an engine for faster growth in emerging markets. And in February 2010, Kraft Foods completed the acquisition of Cadbury for $19.5 billion, which has made the company a global powerhouse in snacks, confectionery, and quick meals. Kraft Foods now has access to Cadbury’s strong international distribution networks, which will allow it to penetrate deeper into emerging markets.

Author Profiles:

• Sanjay Khosla is president of Developing Markets and Global Categories for Kraft Foods. He has more than three decades of leadership experience in global consumer packaged goods companies and has lived and worked around the world.
• Mohanbir Sawhney is the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation Clinical Professor of Technology and director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He has coauthored five books and many articles on marketing, technology, and innovation.