Episode (click to listen)
Brief description
Resources (click to access)
What is strategy? What is our overall approach to designing strategy?
We use the six questions as a "quick and dirty" approach to designing a strategy
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A short animation on the six questions
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Several videos providing more detail on each
We use the Hunger Games and the car rental business to illustrate the criticality of this first step in strategy design
We step out of the six question process briefly to describe a tool that summarises the overall output from addressing the first two questions.
Back to the more detailed, rigorous approach with a discussion of market attractiveness
An entrepreneur describes the impact of 5 forces and what they did to push back on those forces to make some extra margin
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None this episode!
A quick look at PESTLE analysis
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None this episode - there is a lot available on the web
An introduction to our second question, What is the internal situation, plus using the Value Curve to profile customer value propositions
An experienced strategist and leader describes segmentation's role in the turnaround of the YHA - something we discussed back in episode 2
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None this episode!
Thinking holistically about competitive advantage, using the idea of a tree to consolidate different theories about advantage
Three different frameworks for analysing competitive advantage
What financial analysis to do to check your strategic analysis
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None this episode!
Aligning mission and strategy using the Ashridge Mission Diamond
The ex-CEO of the YHA, Caroline White, describes how the YHA aligned their mission, organisation and strategy
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None this episode!
16. Forecasting
One approach to thinking about how things evolve (question 3) is to make a forecast
Interview with Alessandro Piol, an experienced entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist, on how VCs deal with uncertainty
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None this episode!
Sometimes the level of uncertainty means that forecasting is not possible. We provide some advice on how to deal with that sort of tricky, but common, situation
Question 4, defining the primary issue, is a critical step in the strategy process, but it is often skipped over without sufficient reflection and debate.
All your analysis is in vain if you don't identify the most interesting options!
At the end, what counts is picking the best option
You don't always have to start with question 1!
An experienced strategist discusses the six questions and her views on how to use them