Aligning strategy to competitive environment

Aligning strategy to competitive environment: firms that achieve this significantly increase annual total shareholder returns.

Extract from HBR – Martin Reeves:

How predictable are competitive conditions in your industry? How much power does your company have to shape its underlying competitive environment? These questions are critical to strategists, since clearly the kinds of strategies that work in predictable industries are likely to be worlds apart from those geared to shaping highly volatile environments.

This should hardly surprise you. In our recent research, we’ve found that fully three-quarters of the executives we surveyed at 120 companies around the world in 10 major industry sectors were well aware of the need to match their strategies — and the process by which they create them — to the specific conditions of their competitive environment. And yet, our research also found far too many were employing strategies suited only for predictable and immutable industries.

To understand the scope of this problem, take a look at this chart:

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