consistency comes from allegiance to a particular strate-
gic intent. Business-functional consistency comes from
allegiance to intermediate-term goals or challenges with
lower-level employees encouraged to invent how those
goals will be achieved.
JULY-AUGUST 2005 151
» THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATION
weaknesses in Caterpillar or building par-
ticular competitive advantages. When
dterpillar threatened Komatsu in Japan,
for example, Komatsu responded by first
improving quality, then driving down
costs, then cultivating export markets,
and then underwriting new product
development.
Strategic intent sets a target that
deserves personal effort and com-
mitment Ask the CEOs of many Amer-
ican corporations how they measure
their contributions to their companies’
success, and you’re likely to get an an-
swer expressed in terms of shareholder
wealth. In a company that possesses a
strategic intent, top management is
more likely to talk in terms of global
market leadership. Market share leader-
ship typically yields shareholder wealth,
to be sure. But the two goals do not
have the same motivational impact. It
is hard to imagine middle managers, let
alone blue-collar employees, waking
up each day with the sole thought of
But can you plan for global leader-
ship? Did Komatsu, Canon, and Honda
have detailed, 20-year strategies for at-
tacking Western markets? Are Japanese
and Korean managers better planners
than their Western counterparts? No.
As valuable as strategic planning is,
global leadership is an objective that lies
outside the range of planning. We know
of few companies with highly developed
planning systems that have managed to
set a strategic intent. As tests of strategic
fit become more stringent, goals that
cannot be planned for fall by the way-
side. Yet companies that are afraid to
commit to goals that lie outside the
range of planning are unlikely to be-
come global leaders.
Although strategic planning is billed
as a way of becoming more future ori-
ented, most managers, when pressed,
will admit that their strategic plans re-
veal more about today’s problems than
tomorrow’s opportunities. With a fresh
set of problems confronting managers
from an undirected process of intrapre-
neurship. Nor is it the product of a
Skunk Works or other technique for in-
ternal venturing. Behind such programs
lies a nihilistic assumption: that the or-
ganization is so hidebound, so orthodox
ridden, the only way to innovate is to
put a few bright peopie in a dark room,
pour in some money, and hope that
something wonderful will happen. In
this Silicon Valley approach to innova-
tion,the only role for top managers is to
retrofit their corporate strategy to the
entrepreneurial successes that emerge
from below. Here the value added of top
management is low indeed.
Sadly, this view of innovation may be
consistent with reality in many large
companies.^ On the one hand, top man-
agement lacks any particular point of
view about desirable ends beyond satis-
fying shareholders and keeping raiders
at bay. On the other, the planning for-
mat, reward criteria, definition of served
market, and belief in accepted industry
The strategist’s goal is not to find a niche within the existing
industry space but to create new space that is uniquely suited to the company’s
own strengths – space that is off the map.
creating more shareholder wealth. But
mightn’t they feel different given the
challenge to “beat Benz”-the rallying
cry at one Japanese auto producer? Stra-
tegic intent gives employees the only
goal that is worthy of commitment: to
unseat the best or remain the best,
worldwide.
Many companies are more familiar
with strategic planning than they are
with strategic intent. The planning pro-
cess typically acts as a”feasibility sieve.”
Strategies are accepted or rejected on
the basis of whether managers can be
precise about the “how” as well as the
“what”oftheirplans.Are the milestones
clear? Do we have the necessary skills
and resources? How will competitors
react? Has the market been thoroughly
researched? In one form or another, the
admonition “Be realistic!” is given to
line managers at almost every turn.
at the beginning of every planning
cycle, focus often shifts dramatically
from year to year. And with the pace
of change accelerating in most indus-
tries, the predictive horizon is becoming
shorter and shorter. So plans do little
more than project the present forward
incrementally. The goal of strategic in-
tent is to fold the future back into the
present. The important question is not
“How will next year be different from
this year?” but “What must we do dif-
ferently next year to get closer to our
strategic intent?” Only with a carefully
articulated and adhered to strategic in-
tent will a succession of year-on-year
plans sum up to global leadership.
Just as you cannot plan a ten- to 20-
year quest for global leadership, the
chance of falling into a leadership posi-
tion by accident is also remote. We don’t
believe that global leadership comes
practice all work together to tightly con-
strain the range of available means. As
a result, innovation is necessarily an iso-
lated activity. Growth depends more on
the inventive capacity of individuals and
small teams than on the ability of top
management to aggregate the efforts of
multiple teams toward an ambitious
strategic intent.
In companies that have overcome re-
source constraints to build leadership
positions, we see a different relationship
between means and ends. While strate-
gic intent is clear about ends, it is flexi-
ble as to means – it leaves room for im-
provisation. Achieving strategic intent
requires enormous creativity with re-
spect to means: Witness Fujitsu’s use of
strategic alliances in Europe to attack
IBM. But this creativity comes in the ser-
vice of a clearly prescribed end. Cre-
ativity is unbridled but not uncorralled.
152 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Strategic Intent • B E S T OF H B R
because top management establishes
the criterion against which employees
can pretest the logic of their initiatives.
Middle managers must do more than
deliver on promised financial targets;
they must also deliver on the broad di-
rection implicit in their organization’s
strategic intent.
Strategic intent implies a sizable
stretch for an organization. Current ca-
pabilities and resources wilt not suffice.
This forces the organization to be more
inventive, to make the most of limited
resources. Whereas the traditional view
of strategy focuses on the degree of fit
between existing resources and current
opportunities, strategic intent creates
an extreme misfit between resources
and ambitions. Top management then
challenges the organization to close the
gap by systematically building new ad-
vantages. For Canon, this meant first
understanding Xerox’s patents, then li-
censing technology to create a product
that would yield early market experi-
ence, then gearing up internal R&D ef-
forts, then licensing its own technology
to other manufacturers to fund further
R&D, then entering market segments
in lapan and Europe where Xerox was
weak, and so on.
In this respect, strategic intent is like
a marathon run in 400-meter sprints.
No one knows what the terrain will look
like at mile 26, so the role of top man-
agement is to focus the organization’s
attention on the ground to be covered in
the next 400 meters. In several compa-
nies, management did this by present-
ing the organization with a series of cor-
porate challenges, each specifying the
next hill in the race to achieve strategic
intent. One year the challenge might
be quality, the next it might be total
customer care, the next, entry into new
markets, and the next, a rejuvenated
product line. As this example indicates,
corporate challenges are a way to stage
the acquisition of new competitive ad-
vantages, a way to identify the focal
point for employees’ efforts in the near
to medium term. As with strategic in-
tent, top management is specific about
the ends (reducing product develop-
ment times by 75%, for example) but less
prescriptive about the means.
Like strategic intent, challenges
stretch the organization. To preempt
Xerox in the personal copier business.
Canon set its engineers a target price of
$1,000 for a home copier. At the time.
Canon’s least expensive copier sold for
several thousand dollars. Trying to re-
duce the cost of existing models would
not have given Canon the radical price-
performance improvement it needed to
delay or deter Xerox’s entry into per-
sonal copiers. Instead, Canon engineers
were challenged to reinvent the copier-
a challenge they met by substituting
a disposable cartridge for the complex
image-transfer mechanism used in other
copiers.
Corporate challenges come from an-
alyzing competitors as well as from the
foreseeable pattern of industry evolu-
tion. Together these reveal potential
competitive openings and identify the
new skills the organization will need to
take the initiative away from better-
positioned players. (The exhibit “Build-
ing Competitive Advantage at Komatsu”
illustrates the way challenges helped
Komatsu achieve its intent.)
For a challenge to be effective, indi-
viduals and teams throughout the orga-
nization must understand it and see its
implications for their own jobs. Compa-
nies that set corporate challenges to cre-
ate new competitive advantages (as
Ford and IBM did with quality im-
provement) quickly discover that en-
gaging the entire organization requires
top management to do the following:
• Create a sense of urgency, or quasi
crisis, by amplifying weak signals in the
environment that point up the need
to improve, instead of allowing inac-
tion to precipitate a real crisis. Komatsu,
for example, budgeted on the basis of
worst-case exchange rates that overval-
ued the yen.
‘Develop a competitor focus at every
level through widespread use of competi-
tive intelligence. Every employee should
JULY-AUGUST 2005 153
» THE HiGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATION
be able to benchmark his or her efforts
against best-in-class competitors so that
the challenge becomes personal. For in-
stance, Ford showed production-line
workers videotapes of operations at
Mazda’s most efficient plant.
. Provide employees with the skills they
need to work effectively-training in sta-
tistical tools, problem solving, value
engineering, and team building, for
example.
• Give the organization time to digest
one challenge before launching another.
When competing initiatives overload the
organization, middle managers often
try to protect their people from the
whipsaw of shifting priorities. But this
“wait and see if they’re serious this time”
attitude ultimately destroys the credi-
bility of corporate challenges.
• Establish clear milestones and review
mechanisms to track progress, and en-
sure that internal recognition and re-
wards reinforce desired behaviors. The
goal is to make the challenge inescap-
able for everyone in the company.
It is important to distinguish between
the process of managing corporate chal-
lenges and the advantages that the
process creates. Whatever the actual
challenge may be – quality, cost, value
engineering, or something else – there
is the same need to engage employees
intellectually and emotionally in the de-
velopment of new skills. In each case,
the challenge will take root only if se-
nior executives and lower-level employ-
ees feel a reciprocal responsibility for
competitiveness.
We believe workers in many compa-
nies have been asked to take a dispro-
portionate share ofthe blame for com-
petitive failure. In one U.S. company,
for example, management had sought
a 40% wage-package concession from
hourly employees to bring labor costs
into line with Far Eastern competitors.
The result was a long strike and, ulti-
mately, a 10% wage concession from
employees on the line. However, direct
labor costs in manufacturing accounted
for less than 15% of total value added.
The company thus succeeded in demor-
alizing its entire blue-collar workforce
for the sake of a 1.5% reduction in total
costs. Ironically, further analysis showed
that their competitors’ most significant
costs savings came not from lower
hourly wages but from better work
methods invented by employees. You
can imagine how eager the U.S. workers
were to make similar contributions after
the strike and concessions. Contrast this
situation with what happened at Nissan
when the yen strengthened: Top man-
agement took a big pay cut and then
asked middle managers and line em-
ployees to sacrifice relatively less.
Reciprocal responsibility means shared
gain and shared pain. In too many com-
panies, the pain of revitalization falls al-
most exclusively on the employees least
responsible for the enterprise’s decline.
Too often, workers are asked to com-
mit to corporate goals without any
matching commitment from top man-
agement – be it employment security,
gain sharing, or an ability to influence
the direction of the business. This one-
sided approach to regaining competi-
tiveness keeps many companies from
harnessing the intellectual horsepower
of their employees.
Creating a sense of reciprocal re-
sponsibility is crucial because com-
petitiveness ultimately depends on the
pace at which a company embeds new
advantages deep within its organi-
zation, not on its stock of advantages
at any given time. Thus, the concept
of competitive advantage must be ex-
panded beyond the scorecard many
managers now use: Are my costs lower?
Wil! my product command a price
premium?
Few competitive advantages are long
lasting. Uncovering a new competitive
advantage is a bit like getting a hot tip
on a stock: The first person to act on
the insight makes more money than the
last. When the experience curve was
young, a company that built capacity
ahead of competitors, dropped prices to
fill plants, and reduced costs as volume
rose went to the bank. The first mover
traded on the fact that competitors un-
dervalued market share – they didn’t
price to capture additional share be-
cause they didn’t understand how mar-
ket share leadership could be translated
into lower costs and better margins. But
there is no more undervalued market
share when each of 20 semiconductor
companies builds enough capacity to
serve 10% ofthe world market
Building Competitive Advantage at Komatsu
Corporate
Challenge
Programs
Protect Komatsu’s Home
Market Against Caterpillar
early
1960s Licensing deals with
Cummins Engine,
International Harvester,
and Bucyrus-Erie to
acquire technology and
establish benchmarks
1961 Project A (for Ace) to
advance the product
quality of Komatsu’s
small and midsize bull-
dozers above Caterpillar’s
1962 Quality circles company-
wide to provide training
for all employees
Reduce Costs While
Maintaining Quailty
1965 Cost Down
(CD) program
1966 Total CD program
154 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
strategic Intent • BEST OF HBR
Economies of scope may be as important as economies of scale in entering
global markets. But capturing economies of scope demands interbusiness
coordination that only top management can provide.
Keeping score of existing advantages
is not the same as building new advan-
tages. The essence of strategy lies in
creating tomorrow’s competitive ad-
vantages faster than competitors mimic
the ones you possess today. In the 1960s,
Japanese producers relied on labor and
capital cost advantages. As Western
manufacturers began to move produc-
tion offshore, Japanese companies ac-
celerated their investment in process
technology and created scale and qual-
ity advantages. Then, as their U.S. and
European competitors rationalized man-
ufacturing, they added another string to
their bow by accelerating the rate of
product development. Then they built
global brands. Then they de-skilled
competitors through alliances and out-
sourcing deals. The moral? An orga-
nization’s capacity to improve existing
skills and learn new ones is the most
defensible competitive advantage of all.
To achieve a strategic intent, a com-
pany must usually take on larger, better-
financed competitors. That means care-
fully managing competitive engagements
so that scarce resources are conserved.
Managers cannot do that simply by
playing the same game better-making
marginal improvements to competitors’
technology and business practices. In-
stead, they must fundamentally change
the game in ways that disadvantage in-
cumbents; devising novel approaches
to market entry, advantage building,
and competitive warfare. For smart
competitors,the goal is not competitive
imitation but competitive innovation,
the art of containing competitive risks
within manageable proportions.
Four approaches to competitive in-
novation are evident in the global ex-
pansion of Japanese companies. These
are: building layers ofadvantage, search-
ing for loose bricks, changing the terms
Make Komatsu an
International Enterprise
and Build Export Markets
Respond to External
Shocks That Threaten
Markets
Create New Products
and Markets
early
1960s Develop Eastern bloc
countries
1967 Komatsu Europe
marketing subsidiary
established
1970 Komatsu America
established
1972 Project B to improve the
durability and reliability
and to reduce costs of
iarge bulldozers
1972 Project C to improve
payloaders
1972 Project D to improve
hydraulic excavators
1974 Estabiish presales and ser-
vice departments to assist
newly industrializing
countries in construction
projects
1975 V-io program to
reduce costs by 10%
while maintaining
quality; reduce parts
by 20%; rationalize
manufacturing sys-
tem
1977 ¥i8o program to
budget companywide
for?8oyen to the dol-
lar when exchange
rate was 240
1979 Project Etc establish
teams to redouble
cost and quality
efforts in response
to oil crisis
lit*
1970s Accelerate product
development to
expand line
1979 Future and Frontiers
program to identify
new businesses based
on society’s needs
and company’s know-
how
1981 EPOCHS program
to reconcile greater
product variety with
improved production
efficiencies
of engagement, and competing through
collaboration.
The wider a company’s portfolio of
advantages, the less risk it faces in com-
petitive battles. New global competitors
have built such portfolios by steadily ex-
panding their arsenals of competitive
weapons. They have moved inexorably
from less defensible advantages such as
low wage costs to more defensible ad-
vantages such as global brands. The Jap-
anese color television industry illus-
trates this layering process.
By 1967, Japan had become the
largest producer of black-and-white tele-
vision sets. By 1970, it was closing the
gap in color televisions. Japanese man-
ufacturers used their competitive advan-
tage-at that time, primarily, low labor
costs-to build a base in the private-label
business, then moved quickly to estab-
lish world-scale plants. This investment
gave them additional layers of advan-
tage-quality and reliability-as well as
further cost reductions from process im-
provements. At the same time, they rec-
ognized that these cost-based advan-
tages were vulnerable to changes in
labor costs, process and product tech-
nology, exchange rates, and trade pol-
icy. So throughout the 1970s, they also
invested heavily in building channels
and brands, thus creating another layer
ofadvantage: a global franchise. In the
late 1970S, they enlarged the scope of
their products and businesses to amor-
tize these grand investments, and by
1980 all the major players- Matsushita,
Sharp,Toshiba, Hitachi, Sanyo-had es-
tablished related sets of businesses that
could support global marketing invest-
ments. More recently, they have been
investing in regional manufacturing and
design centers to tailor their products
more closely to national markets.
These manufacturers thought ofthe
various sources of comF>etitive advan-
tage as mutually desirable layers, not
JULY-AUGUST 2005 155
» THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATION
mutually exclusive choices. What some
call competitive suicide-pursuing both
cost and differentiation-is exactly what
many competitors strive for.-‘ Using flex-
ible manufacturing technologies and
better marketing intelligence, they are
moving away from standardized “world
products”to products like Mazda’s mini-
van, developed in California expressly
for the U.S. market.
Another approach to competitive in-
novation, searching for loose bricks, ex-
ploits the benefits of surprise, which is
just as useful in business battles as it
is in war. Particularly in the early stages
of a war for global markets, successful
new competitors work to stay below
the response threshold of their larger,
more powerful rivals. Staking out under-
defended territory is one way to do this.
To find loose bricks, managers must
have few orthodoxies about how to
break into a market or challenge a com-
petitor. For example, in one large U.S.
multinational, we asked several country
managers to describe what a Japanese
competitor was doing in the local mar-
ket. The first executive said, “They’re
coming at us in the low end. Japanese
companies always come in at the bot-
tom.” The second speaker found the
comment interesting but disagreed:
“They don’t offer any low-end products
in my market, but they have some ex-
citing stuff at the top end. We really
should reverse engineer that thing.” An-
other colleague told still another story.
“They haven’t taken any business away
from me,” he said,”but they’ve just made
me a great offer to supply components.”
In each country, the Japanese competi-
tor had found a different loose brick.
The search for loose bricks begins
with a careful analysis of the competi-
tor’s conventional wisdom: How does
the company define its”served market”?
What activities are most profitable?
Which geographic markets are too trou-
blesome to enter? The objective is not to
find a comer of the industry (or niche)
where larger competitors seldom tread
but to build a base of attack just out-
side the market territory that industry
leaders currently occupy. The goal is
an uncontested profit sanctuary, which
could be a particular product segment
(the “low end” in motorcycles), a slice
of the value chain (components in the
computer industry), or a particular geo-
graphic market (Eastern Europe).
When Honda took on leaders in the
motorcycle industry, for example, it
began with products that were just out-
side the conventional definition ofthe
leaders’ product-market domains. As a
result, it could build a base of opera-
tions in underdefended territory and
then use that base to launch an ex-
panded attack. What many competi-
tors failed to see was Honda’s strategic
intent and its growing competence in
engines and power trains. Yet even as
Honda was selling 50CC motorcycles in
the United States, it was already racing
inition of industry and segment bound-
aries-represents still another form of
competitive innovation. Canon’s entry
into the copier business illustrates this
approach.
During the 1970s, both Kodak and
IBM tried to match Xerox’s business sys-
tem in terms of segmentation, products,
distribution, service, and pricing. As a
result, Xerox had no trouble decoding
the new entrants’ intentions and devel-
oping countermoves. IBM eventually
withdrew from the copier business,
while Kodak remains a distant second in
the large copier market that Xerox still
dominates.
Canon, on the other hand, changed
the terms of competitive engagement.
While Xerox built a wide range of
Almost every strategic management theory
and nearly every corporate planning system
is premised on a strategy hierarchy in which
corporate goals guide business unit strategies and
business unit strategies guide functional tactics.
larger bikes in Europe ~ assembling the
design skills and technology it would
need for a systematic expansion across
the entire spectrum of motor-related
businesses.
Honda’s progress in creating a core
competence in engines should have
warned competitors that it might enter
a series of seemingly unrelated indus-
tries ~ automobiles, lawn mowers, ma-
rine engines, generators. But with each
company fixated on its own market, the
threat of Honda’s horizontal diversifica-
tion went unnoticed. Today, companies
like Matsushita and Toshiba are simi-
larly poised to move in unexpected ways
across industry boundaries. In protect-
ing loose bricks, companies must ex-
tend their peripheral vision by tracking
and anticipatingthe migration of global
competitors across product segments,
businesses, national markets, value-
added stages, and distribution channels.
Changing the terms of engagement-
refusing to accept the front-runner’s def-
copiers. Canon standardized machines
and components to reduce costs. It
chose to distribute through office prod-
uct dealers rather than try to match
Xerox’s huge direct sales force. It also
avoided the need to create a national
service network by designing reliability
and serviceability into its product and
then delegating service responsibility to
the dealers. Canon copiers were sold
rather than leased, freeing Canon from
the burden of financing the lease base.
Finally, instead of selling to the heads
of corporate duplicating departments,
Canon appealed to secretaries and de-
partment managers who wanted dis-
tributed copying. At each stage. Canon
neatly sidestepped a potential barrier
to entry.
Canon’s experience suggests that there
is an important distinction between bar-
riers to entry and barriers to imitation.
Competitors that tried to match Xerox’s
business system had to pay the same
entry costs – the barriers to imitation
156 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
strategic Intent • BEST OF HBR
were high. But Canon dramatically re-
duced the barriers to entry by changing
the rules ofthe game.
Changing the rules also short-circuited
Xerox’s ability to retaliate quickly against
its new rival. Confronted with the need
to rethink its business strategy and or-
ganization, Xerox was paralyzed for a
time. Its managers realized that the faster
they downsized the product line, devel-
oped new channels, and improved reli-
ability, the faster they would erode the
company’s traditional profit base. What
might have been seen as critical success
factors-Xerox’s national sales force and
service network, its large installed base
of leased machines, and its reliance on
service revenues-instead became bar-
riers to retaliation. In this sense, com-
petitive innovation is like judo: The goal
is to use a larger competitor’s weight
against it. And that happens not by
matching the leader’s capabilities but
by developing contrasting capabilities
of one’s own.
Competitive innovation works on
the premise that a successful competi-
tor is likely to be wedded to a recipe for
success. That’s why the most effective
weapon new competitors possess is
probably a clean sheet of paper. And
why an incumbent’s greatest vulnera-
bility is its belief in accepted practice.
Through licensing,outsourcing agree-
ments, and joint ventures, it is some-
times possible to win without fighting.
For example, Fujitsu’s alliances in Eu-
rope with Siemens and STC (Britain’s
largest computer maker) and in the
United States with Amdahl yield manu-
facturing volume and access to Western
markets. In the eariy 1980s, Matsushita
established a joint venture with Thorn
(in the United Kingdom), Telefunken (in
Germany), and Thomson (in France),
which allowed it to quickly multiply the
forces arrayed against Philips in the
battle for leadership in the European
VCR business. In fighting larger global
rivals by proxy, Japanese companies
have adopted a maxim as old as human
conflict itself: My enemy’s enemy is my
friend.
Hijacking the development efforts
of potential rivals is another goal of
competitive collaboration. In the con-
sumer electronics war, Japanese com-
petitors attacked traditional businesses
like TVs and hi-fis while volunteering to
manufacture next generation products
like VCRs, camcorders, and CD players
for Western rivals. They hoped their ri-
vals would ratchet down development
spending, and, in most cases, that is pre-
cisely what happened. But companies
that abandoned their own development
efforts seldom reemerged as serious
competitors in subsequent new product
battles.
Collaboration can also be used to cal-
ibrate competitors’ strengths and weak-
nesses. Toyota’s joint venture with GM,
and Mazda’s with Ford, give these au-
tomakers an invaluable vantage point
for assessing the progress their U.S. ri-
vals have made in cost reduction, qual-
ity, and technology. They can also learn
how GM and Ford compete-when they
will fight and when they won’t. Of
course, the reverse is also true: Ford and
GM have an equal opportunity to learn
from their partner-competitors.
The route to competitive revitaliza-
tion we have been mapping implies a
new view of strategy. Strategic intent as-
sures consistency in resource allocation
over the long term. Clearly articulated
corporate challenges focus the efforts
of individuals in the medium term. Fi-
nally, competitive innovation helps re-
duce competitive risk in the short term.
This consistency in the long term, focus
in the medium term, and inventiveness
and involvement in the short term pro-
vide the key to leveraging limited re-
sources in pursuit of ambitious goals.
But just as there is a process of winning,
so there is a process of surrender. Revi-
talization requires understanding that
process, too.
Given their technological leadership
and access to large regional markets,
how did U.S. and European countries
lose their apparent birthright to domi-
nate global industries? There is no sim-
ple answer. Few companies recognize
the value of documenting failure. Fewer
still search their own managerial ortho-
doxies for the seeds of competitive sur-
render. But we believe there is a path-
ology of surrender that gives some im-
portant clues. (See the sidebar”The Pro-
cess of Surrender.”)
it is not very comforting to think that
the essence of Western strategic thought
can be reduced to eight rules for excel-
lence, seven S’s, five competitive forces,
four product life-cycle stages, three
generic strategies, and innumerable
two-by-two matrices.” Yet for the past
20 years, “advances” in strategy have
taken the form of ever more typologies,
heuristics, and laundry lists, often with
dubious empirical bases. Moreover, even
reasonable concepts like the product life
cycle, experience curve, product portfo-
lios, and generic strategies often have
toxic side effects: They reduce the num-
ber of strategic options management is
willing to consider. They create a pref-
erence for selling businesses rather than
defending them. They yield predictable
strategies that rivals easily decode.
Strategy recipes limit opportunities
for competitive innovation. A company
may have 40 businesses and only four
strategies – invest, hold, harvest, or di-
vest. Too often, strategy is seen as a po-
sitioning exercise in which options are
tested by how they fit the existing in-
dustry structure. But current industry
structure reflects the strengths of the
industry leader, and playing by the
leader’s rules is usually competitive
suicide.
Armed with concepts like segmenta-
tion, the value chain, competitor bench-
marking, strategic groups, and mobility
barriers, many managers have become
better and better at drawing industry
maps. But while they have been busy
mapmaking, their competitors have
been moving entire continents. The
strategist’s goal is not to find a niche
within the existing industry space but to
create new space that is uniquely suited
to the company’s own strengths-space
that is off the map.
This is particularly true now that in-
dustry boundaries are becoming more
and more unstable. In industries such as
financial services and communications,
rapidly changing technology, deregu-
lation, and globalization have under-
mined the value of traditional industry
JULY-AUGUST 2005 157
» THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATION
analysis. Mapmaking skills are worth lit-
tle in the epicenter of an earthquake.
But an industry in upheaval presents
opportunities for ambitious companies
to redraw the map in their favor, so long
as they can think outside traditional in-
dustry boundaries.
Concepts like “mature”and”declining”
are largely definitional. What most exec-
utives mean when they label a business
“mature” is that sales growth has stag-
nated in their current geographic mar-
kets for existing products sold through
existing channels. In such cases, it’s not
the industry that is mature, but the ex-
ecutives’ conception of the industry.
Asked if the piano business was ma-
ture, a senior executive at Yamaha
replied, “Only if we can’t take any mar-
ket share from anybody anywhere in
the world and still make money. And
anyway, we’re not in the ‘piano’ busi-
ness, we’re in the ‘keyboard’ business.”
Year after year, Sony has revitalized its
radio and tape recorder businesses, de-
spite the fact that other manufacturers
long ago abandoned these businesses
as mature.
A narrow concept of maturity can
foreclose a company from a broad
stream of future opportunities. In the
1970s, several U.S. companies thought
that consumer electronics had become
a mature industry. What could possibly
top the color TV? they asked them-
selves. RCA and GE, distracted by op-
portunities in more “attractive” indus-
tries like mainframe computers, left
Japanese producers with a virtual mo-
The Process of Surrender
O
n the battles for global leadership that have taken
place during the past two decades, we have seen
a pattern of competitive attack and retrench-
ment that was remarkably similar across industries. We
call this the process of surrender.
The process started with unseen intent. Not possess-
ing long-term, competitor-focused goals themselves,
Western companies did not ascribe such intentions to
their rivals. They also calculated the threat posed by po-
tential competitors in terms of their existing resources
rather than their resourcefulness. This led to systematic
underestimation of smaller rivals who were fast gaining
technology through licensing arrangements, acquiring
market understanding
holdings in less-developed countries, use of nontradi-
tional channels, extensive corporate advertising) were ig-
nored or dismissed as quirky. For example, managers we
spoke with said Japanese companies’ position in the Eu-
ropean computer industry was nonexistent. In terms of
brand share that’s nearly true, but the Japanese control
as much as one-third ofthe manufacturing value added
in the hardware sales of European-based computer busi-
nesses. Similarly, German auto producers claimed to feel
unconcerned over the proclivity of Japanese producers
to move upmarket. But with its low-end models under
tremendous pressure from Japanese producers, Porsche
has now announced that it will no longer make “entry
level” cars,
Western managers often misinterpreted their rivals’
tactics. They believed that Japanese and Korean compa-
nies were competing
Unseen
Strategic Intent
from downstream OEM
partners, and improv-
ing product quality and
manufacturing produc-
tivity through company-
wide employee involvement programs.
Oblivious ofthe strategic intent and intangi-
ble advantages of their rivals, American and
European businesses were caught ofTguard.
Adding to the competitive surprise was
the fact that the new entrants typically at-
tacked the periphery ofa market (Honda in
small motorcycles, Yamaha in grand pianos,
Toshiba in small black-and-white televisions)
before going head-to-head with incumbents.
Incumbents often misread these attacks,
seeing them as part of a niche strategy and
not as a search for “loose bricks.” Unconven-
tional market entry strategies (minority
Underestimated
Resourcefulness
Competitive
Surprise
Partial
Response
4 _
Catch-Up
Trap
Unconventional
Entry Tactics
solely on the basis of cost
and quality. This typically
I produced a partial re-
sponse to those competi-
tors’ initiatives: moving
manufacturing offshore, outsourcing, or in-
stituting a quality program. Seldom was the
full extent ofthe competitive threat appreci-
ated-the multiple layers of advantage, the
expansion across related product segments,
the development of global brand positions.
Imitating the currently visible tactics of ri-
vals put Western businesses into a perpet-
ual catch-up trap. One by one, companies
lost battles and came to see surrender as in-
evitable. Surrender was not inevitable, of
course, but the attack was staged in a way
that disguised ultimate intentions and side-
stepped direct confrontation.
158 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
strategic Intent • BEST OF HBR
nopoly in VCRs, camcorders, and CD
players. Ironically, the TV business, once
thought mature, is on the verge of a
dramatic renaissance. A $20 billion-a-
year business will be created when high-
definition television is launched in the
United States. But the pioneers of tele-
vision may capture only a small part of
this bonanza.
Most of the tools of strategic analy-
sis are focused domestically Few force
managers to consider global opportuni-
ties and threats. For example, portfolio
planning portrays top management’s
investment options as an array of busi-
nesses rather than as an array of geo-
graphic markets. The result is predict-
able: As businesses come under attack
cess or failure squarely on the shoulders
of line managers. Each business is as-
sumed to have ali the resources it needs
to execute its strategies successfully, and
in this no-excuses environment, it is
hard for top management to fail. But
desirable as clear lines of responsibil-
ity and accountability are, competitive
revitalization requires positive value
added from top management.
Few companies with a strong SBU
orientation have built successful global
distribution and brand positions. In-
vestments in a global brand franchise
typically transcend the resources and
risk propensity of a single business.
While some Western companies have
had global brand positions for 30 or 40
mies of scale in entering global markets.
But capturing economies of scope de-
mands interbusiness coordination that
only top management can provide.
We believe that infiexible SBU-type
organizations have also contributed to
the de-skilling of some companies. For
a single SBU, incapable of sustaining an
investment in a core competence such
as semiconductors, optical media, or
combustion engines, the only way to
remain competitive is to purchase key
components from potential (often Jap-
anese or Korean) competitors. For an
SBU defined in product market terms,
competitiveness means offering an end
product that is competitive in price and
performance. But that gives an SBU
A threat that everyone perceives but no one talks about creates
more anxiety than a threat that has been clearly identified and made
the focal point for the problem-solving efforts of the entire company.
from foreign competitors, the company
attempts to abandon them and enter
other areas in which the forces of global
competition are not yet so strong. In
the short term, this may be an appro-
priate response to waning competitive-
ness, but there are fewer and fewer busi-
nesses in which a domestic-oriented
company can find refuge. We seldom
hear such companies asking. Can we
move into emerging markets overseas
ahead of our global rivals and prolong
the profitability of this business? Can
we counterattack in our global com-
petitors’ home market and slow the
pace of their expansion? A senior exec-
utive in one successful global company
made a telling comment: “We’re glad
to find a competitor managing by the
portfolio concept – we can almost pre-
dict how much share we’ll have to take
away to put the business on the CEO’s
‘sell list.'”
Companies can also be overcommit-
ted to organizational recipes, such as
strategic business units (SBUs) and the
decentralization an SBU structure im-
plies. Decentralization is seductive be-
cause it places the responsibility for suc-
years or more (Heinz, Siemens, IBM,
Ford, and Kodak, for example), it is hard
to identify any American or European
company that has created a new global
brand franchise in the past ten to 15
years. Yet Japanese companies have cre-
ated a score or more – NEC, Fujitsu,
Panasonic (Matsushita), Toshiba, Sony,
Seiko, Epson, Canon, Minolta, and
Honda among them.
General Electric’s situation is typical.
In manyofits businesses,this American
giant has been almost unknown in Eu-
rope and Asia. GE made no coordinated
effort to build a global corporate fran-
chise. Any GE business with interna-
tional ambitions had to bear the bur-
den of establishing its credibility and
credentials in the new market alone.
Not surprisingly, some once-strong GE
businesses opted out ofthe difficult task
of building a global brand position. By
contrast, smaller Korean companies like
Samsung, Daewoo, and Lucky-Goldstar
are busy building global-brand umbrel-
las that will ease market entry for a
whole range of businesses. The under-
lying principle is simple: Economies of
scope may be as important as econo-
manager little incentive to distinguish
between external sourcingthat achieves
“product embodied” competitiveness
and internal development that yields
deeply embedded organizational com-
petencies that can be exploited across
multiple businesses. Where upstream
component-manufacturing activities
are seen as cost centers with cost-plus
transfer pricing, additional investment
in the core activity may seem a less prof-
itable use of capital than investment in
downstream activities. To make matters
worse, internal accounting data may not
reflect the competitive value of retain-
ing control over a core competence.
Together, a shared global corporate
brand franchise and a shared core com-
petence act as mortar in many Japa-
nese companies. Lacking this mortar, a
company’s businesses are truly loose
bricks – easily knocked out by global
competitors that steadily invest in core
competences. Such competitors can co-
opt domestically oriented companies
into long-term sourcing dependence
and capture the economies of scope of
global brand investment through inter-
business coordination.
JULY-AUGUST 2005 159
» THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATION
Last in decentralization’s list of dan-
gers is the standard of managerial per-
formance typically used in SBU organi-
zations. In many companies, business
unit managers are rewarded solely on
the basis of their performance against
return on investment targets. Unfortu-
nately, that often leads to denominator
management because executives soon
discover that reductions in investment
and head count-the denominator-“im-
prove”the financial ratios by which they
are measured more easily than growth
in the numerator: revenues. It also fos-
ters a hair-trigger sensitivity to industry
downturns that can be very costly. Man-
agers who are quick to reduce invest-
ment and dismiss workers find it takes
much longer to regain lost skills and
catch up on investment when the in-
dustry turns upward again. As a result,
they lose market share in every business
cycle. Particularly in industries where
there is fierce competition for the best
peopie and where competitors invest re-
lentlessly, denominator management
creates a retrenchment ratchet.
The concept ofthe general manager
as a movable peg reinforces the problem
of denominator management. Business
schools are guilty here because they
have perpetuated the notion that a
manager with net present value calcu-
lations in one hand and portfolio plan-
ning in the other can manage any busi-
ness anywhere.
In many diversified companies, top
management evaluates line managers
on numbers alone because no other
basis for dialogue exists. Managers move
so many times as part of their “career
development” that they often do not un-
derstand the nuances ofthe businesses
they are managing. At GE, for example,
one fast-track manager heading an im-
portant new venture had moved across
five businesses in five years. His series
of quick successes finally came to an end
when he confronted a Japanese com-
petitor whose managers had been plod-
ding along in the same business for
more than a decade.
Regardless of ability and effort, fast-
track managers are unlikely to develop
the deep business knowledge they need
to discuss technology options, competi-
tors’ strategies, and global opportuni-
ties substantive ly. Invariably, therefore,
discussions gravitate to “the numbers,”
while the value added of managers is
limited to the financial and planning
savvy they carry from job to job. Knowl-
edge of the company’s internal plan-
ning and accounting systems substitutes
for substantive knowledge of the busi-
ness, making competitive innovation
unlikely.
When managers know that their as-
signments have a two- to three-year
time frame, they feel great pressure to
create a good track record fast. This pres-
sure often takes one of two forms. Either
the manager does not commit to goals
whose time line extends beyond his or
her expected tenure. Or ambitious goals
are adopted and squeezed into an unre-
aiistically short time frame. Aiming to
be number one in a business is the
essence of strategic intent; but imposing
a three- to four-year horizon on the ef-
fort simply invites disaster. Acquisitions
are made with little attention to the
archy undermines competitiveness by
fostering an elitist view of management
that tends to disenfranchise most ofthe
organization. Employees fail to identify
with corporate goals or involve them-
selves deeply in the work of becoming
more competitive.
The strategy hierarchy isn’t the only
explanation for an elitist view of man-
agement, of course. The myths that
grow up around successful top manag-
ers-“Lee Iacocca saved Chrysler,””Carlo
De Benedetti rescued Olivetti,” “John
Sculley turned Apple around”-perpet-
uate it. So does the turbulent business
environment Middle managers buffeted
by circumstances that seem to be be-
yond their control desperately want to
believe that top management has ail the
answers. And top management, in turn,
hesitates to admit it does not for fear of
demoralizing lower-level employees.
The result of all this is often a code
of silence in which the full extent of a
company’s competitiveness problem is
not widely shared. We interviewed busi-
ness unit managers in one company,
Japanese companies realize that top managers
are a bit like the astronauts who circie the Earth
in the space shuttle. It may be the astronauts
who get ail the glory, but everyone knows that the
real inteiiigence behind the mission is located
firmly on the ground.
problems of integration. The organiza-
tion becomes overloaded with initia-
tives. Collaborative ventures are formed
without adequate attention to compet-
itive consequences.
Almost every strategic management
theory and nearly every corporate plan-
ning system is premised on a strategy hi-
erarchy in which corporate goals guide
business unit strategies and business
unit strategies guide functional tactics.^
In this hierarchy, senior management
makes strategy and lower levels execute
it. The dichotomy between formulation
and implementation is familiar and
widely accepted. But the strategy hier-
for example, who were extremely anx-
ious because top management wasn’t
talking openly about the competitive
challenges the company faced. They as-
sumed the lack of communication in-
dicated a lack of awareness on their se-
nior managers’ part. But when asked
whether they were open with their own
employees, these same managers replied
that while they could face up to the
problems, the people below them could
not Indeed, the only time the workforce
heard about the company’s competi-
tiveness problems was during wage ne-
gotiations when problems were used to
extract concessions.
160 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
strategic Intent • BEST OF HBR
Unfortunately, a threat that everyone
perceives but no one talks about creates
more anxiety than a threat that has
been clearly identified and made the
focal point for the problem-solving ef-
forts ofthe entire company. That is one
reason honesty and humiiity on the part
of top management may be the first pre-
requisite of revitalization. Another rea-
son is the need to make “participation”
more than a buzzword.
Programs such as quality circles and
total customer service often fall short
of expectations because management
does not recognize that successful im-
plementation requires more than ad-
ministrative structures. Difficulties in
embedding new capabilities are typ-
ically put down to “communication”
problems, with the unstated assump-
tion that if only downward communi-
cation were more effective – “if only
middle management would get the mes-
sage straight”-the new program would
quickly take root. The need for upward
communication is often ignored, or as-
sumed to mean nothing more than feed-
back. In contrast, Japanese companies
win not because they have smarter man-
agers but because they have developed
ways to harness the “wisdom of the
anthiIl.”They realize that top managers
are a bit like the astronauts who circle
the Earth in the space shuttle. It may
be the astronauts who get all the glory,
but everyone knows that the real intel-
ligence behind the mission is located
firmly on the ground.
Where strategy formulation is an
elitist activity, it is also difficult to pro-
duce truly creative strategies. For one
thing, there are not enough heads and
points of view in divisional or corpo-
rate planning departments to challenge
conventional wisdom. For another, cre-
ative strategies seldom emerge from
the annual planning ritual. The starting
point for next year’s strategy is almost
always this year’s strategy. Improve-
ments are incremental. The company
sticks to the segments and territories it
knows, even though the real opportu-
nities may be elsewhere. The impetus
for Canon’s pioneering entry into the
personal copier business came from an
overseas sales subsidiary – not from
planners in Japan.
The goal ofthe strategy hierarchy re-
mains valid – to ensure consistency up
and down the organization. But this
consistency is better derived from a
clearly articulated strategic intent than
from inflexibly applied top-down plans.
In the 1990s, the challenge will be to
enfranchise employees to invent the
means to accomplish ambitious ends.
clear: “We don’t trust you. You’ve shown
no ability to achieve profitable growth.
Just cut out the slack, manage the de-
nominators, and perhaps you’ll be taken
over by a company that can use your
resources more creatively.” Very little
in the track record of most large West-
em companies warrants the confidence
of the stock market. Investors aren’t
hopelessly short-term, they’re justifiably
skeptical.
The goal ofthe strategy hierarchy remains valid-
to ensure consistency up and down the
organization. But this consistency is better
derived from a clearly articulated strategic intent
than from inflexibly applied top-down plans.
We seldom found cautious adminis-
trators among the top managements of
companies that came from behind to
challenge incumbents for global leader-
ship. But in studying organizations that
had surrendered, we invariably found
senior managers who, for whatever rea-
son, lacked the courage to commit their
companies to heroic goals – goals that
lay beyond the reach of planning and ex-
isting resources. The conservative goals
they set failed to generate pressure and
enthusiasm for competitive innovation
or give the organization much useful
guidance. Financial targets and vague
mission statements just cannot provide
the consistent direction that is a pre-
requisite for winning a global competi-
tive war.
This kind of conservatism is usually
blamed on the financial markets. But
we believe that in most cases, investors’
so-called short-term orientation simply
reflects a lack of confidence in the abil-
ity of senior managers to conceive and
deliver stretch goals. The chairman of
one company complained bitterly that
even after improving return on capital
employed to over 40% (by ruthlessly di-
vesting lackluster businesses and down-
sizing others), the stock market held the
company to an 8:1 price/earnings ratio.
Of course, the market’s message was
We believe that top management’s
caution refiects a lack of confidence in
its own ability to involve the entire or-
ganization in revitalization, as opposed
to simply raising financial targets. De-
veloping faith in the organization’s abil-
ity to deliver on tough goals, motivating
it to do so, focusing its attention long
enough to internalize new capabili-
ties – this is the real challenge for top
management. Only by rising to this chal-
lenge will senior managers gain the
courage they need to commit them-
selves and their companies to global
leadership. ^
1. Among the first to apply the concept of strategy
to management were H, Igor Ansoff in Corporate
Strategy: An Analytic Approach toBusiness Policyfor
Growth and Expansion (McGraw HitI, 1965) and
Kenneth R. Andrews in The Concept of Corporate
Strategy (Dow Jones-lrwin, 1971).
2. Robert A. Burgelman,”A Process Model of Inter-
nal Corporate Venturing in t h e Diversified Major
Firm” Administrative Science Quarterly, June 1983.
3. For example, see Michael E. Porter, Competitive
Strategy (Free Press, 1980).
4- Strategic frameworks for resource allocation in di-
versified companies are summarized in Charles W.
Hofer and Dan E. Schendel, Strategy Formulation:
Analytical Concepts (West Publishing, 1978),
5. For example, see Peter Lorange and Richard F.
Vancil, Strategic Planning Systems (Prentice-Hail,
1977).
Reprint R0507N; HBR OnPoint 6557
To order, see page 195.
JULY-AUGUST 2 0 0 5 161
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