What Makes Your Firm Special?
Capitalising on strategic assets
Cliff Bowman
Steve Macaulay
Companies are continually urged to make the most of their
specialness, their uniqueness. Now, how to you go about that – both
finding it and capitalising on it?
To help us explore this issue is Professor Cliff Bowman. Cliff, is it
worth the effort of find out what makes you special?
Cliff Bowman
It most certainly is. What you need to do is to understand what is
giving you advantage in the market place that you are in; it is
something about the product or service that you are offering which is
valued by your particular customers. If you can identify what those
dimensions are that are critical to them and why they choose you
over a rival and you can work back from there and say, ok, what
enables us to deliver that level of customer value efficiently.
Now that takes us back inside the organisation and what we have
found is that you start to uncover sources of advantage as we would
call them, which are not obvious things and they are often very
particular and peculiar – idiosyncratic to the organisation. They are
things which have been built up over the years typically and they are
things like relationships that people have, that specific people have
with specific clients – know how that a particular designer has that we
manage to keep and develop, tacit routines which is a collective
performance of a team of people that really helps to serve these
clients in an effective way, much more responsively than rivals can.
People use the term culture often to describe this, which is a very
catch all phrase, but there will be aspects of how we do things which
give us that little edge which means that, for example, when our sales
people go out into the field, they behave in a way which gives people
more confidence that the organisation is going to deliver.
Now if we can identify what these sources of advantage are, we call
them strategic assets and capabilities, then the minimum thing we
can do is to protect them – protect them from changes that would
otherwise disturb these sources of advantage. Better still we might
be able to think about where we can take these capabilities and assets
to build new types of business – so where these capabilities would
add value somewhere else – and we might strive to think about how
we can create more sources of advantage like this. But the starting
point must be understanding what are the strategic assets that we
currently have.
© Cranfield University
www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com
1
Cliff Bowman
Steve Macaulay
So your message would be don’t necessarily try and emulate the
fabulous success of an Apple or a Google or something like that, look
inwards, try and understand where your uniqueness comes from?
Cliff Bowman
Absolutely; any generic solution that is often contained in popular
management books cannot give you a specific advantage, it stands to
reason, because if we have all got the same thing then by definition
nobody has differentiated one from another. So you need to look
inside the firm, each firm is unique and has a unique history – a
pathway that it has gone down and there are some good bits and
some not so good bits, but it is figuring out what those really good
bits are and then making sure that we capitalise on those and protect
them.
Steve Macaulay
Can you do this on your own? Obviously you have helped
organisations do this, is this something where a management team
can sit round and do that?
Cliff Bowman
I think what we need to do is to build the capability in the executives
themselves, so they are able to do this kind of thinking and this kind
of analysis themselves.
Any time you involve an external person – consultant or agent from
outside – into the process, it disturbs the process in some way. And
there is always the issue of commitment and belief. I have done
consulting work in the past where I have gone in and during the
process everyone seems to be on board and they are committed to it,
but I view it like an elastic band – I have pulled them over to here, to
my way of thinking about their organisation. And that is great as long
as I am there, but as soon I come away, boing we go back to where we
were. And it is understandable.
The other thing I would say, the final thing I would say about this, is
that you can’t pass the buck for strategy to a consultant. If a
consultant comes up with a strategy for your organisation and you
look at it and they have done all the analysis, but at a gut level you
don’t feel it is right for you then I would go with your gut feel, because
that factors in so many more nuanced angles of the organisation’s
subtle differences that isn’t necessarily going to be obvious to an
outside person analysing data that he can get hold of.
Steve Macaulay
So a key message for managers then, is it is down to you, you really
need to get hold of that uniqueness and make the most of it?
Cliff Bowman
And you need the strategic capability yourself to be able to do that
job yourself.
Steve Macaulay
Cliff, thank you very much.
© Cranfield University
www.cranfieldknowledgeinterchange.com
2