Much of our work is helping leadership teams formulate the right questions. Once they get the questions right, the answers tend to appear.

Teams need to be well-rounded, but their individual members don’t have to be.

Articulating a similarly clear and differentiated strategy, supported by a strong core culture that can deliver on the brand’s promises, is the key for any company wanting to scale up.

Like the trends, this handful of inherent strengths (core competencies) and weaknesses needs to be determined and listed on the bottom of the OPSP.

In many large organizations, the challenge is often diagnosed as internal. That is, the organization’s competitive problems may be much lighter than the obstacles imposed by its own outdated routines, bureaucracy, pools of entrenched interests, lack of cooperation across units, and plain-old bad management. Thus, the guiding policy lies in the realm of reorganization and renewal. And the set of coherent actions are changes in people, power, and procedures. In other cases the challenge may be building or deepening competitive advantage by pushing the frontiers of organizational capability.