Innovation Management
Topic: can a strategic intent be too ambitious ?
Students 1:
Students 2:
Nguyen Thien Toan (阮善全).
陳一靈
Student ID: M981Y208
M981A209
Email: ngthtoan@gmail.com
superlugiamax@yahoo.com.tw
Strategic Intent Defined
Strategic intent is a high-level statement of the means by which your organization will achieve its vision.
It is a statement of design for creating a desirable future (stated in present terms). Simply put, a strategic intent
is a company's vision of what it wants to achieve in the long term.
“An ambitious and compelling dream which provides emotional and intellectual energy for the company
and defines the journey to the future.”( Gary Hamel)
Purpose of Strategic Intent
The logic, uniqueness and discovery that make your strategic intent come to life are vitally important for
employees. They have to understand, believe and live according to it.
Strategy should be a stretch exercise, not a fit exercise. Expression of strategic intent is to help
individuals and organizations share the common intention to survive and continue or extend themselves
through time and space.
Defining Strategic Intent
Strategic intent takes the form of a number of corporate challenges, specified as short term projects and
opportunities.
The strategic intent must convey a significant stretch for your company, a sense of direction, discovery,
and opportunity that can be communicated as worthwhile to all employees. It should not focus so much on
today's problems, which are normally dealt with by company visions and missions, but rather on tomorrow's
opportunities.
The strategic focus is the starting point for developing a statement of strategic intent. A statement of
strategy must become then a statement of design through which the principles, processes and practices of an
organization are developed. These statements must represent the whole as seen from any location in the
organization.
Strategic intent should specify the competitive factors, the factors critical to success in the future. The
end result should lay beyond the present planning period.
In order to determine your business’ strategic intent, you must not only consider what you want in the
next five or ten years, but what you want to accomplish in a 50 year timeframe.
The main tenets of strategic intent planning are direction, discovery and destiny.

Sense of Direction includes an understanding about the long-term market or competitive position that a
firm aims to build over the next decade. Your sense of direction should be a view of the future that
conveys a unifying and personalizing sense of direction.

Sense of Discovery. Your strategic intent should retain a sense of discovery and excitement about the
future. This helps create a competitively unique outlook and gives employees the opportunity to explore
new competitive territory.

Sense of Destiny. Strategic intent has an emotional edge to it and it should be a goal that both you and
your employees perceive as inherently worthwhile.
Defining your strategic intent clarifies objectives for both you and your employees. By setting out your
strategic intent, you make clear your company’s goals and help set the path for future successes.
Can strategy intent be too ambitious?
Firm should identify resources and capabilities needed to close gap between strategic intent and current
position. . But , where is the limit for a strategy intent ? could it be liked a dream where everything is possible ?
If not , the strategy intent could be too ambitious, the company impossible to reach it , even in long term
- Having a sense of the possible means taking the blinders off. To those constrained by traditional corporate
thinking, strategic intent may appear reminiscent of tools like strategic positioning or SWOT (strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, threats), tools that "given the athletic condition of our current corporate body, what
sport are we able to play best?"
- Nothing could be further from the truth. Strategic positioning and SWOT are minimization techniques.
Companies deploying such approaches seek only to attack markets with products/services their existing
competencies and functional capabilities have to offer.
- Alternatively, a cornerstone of strategic intent is maximization. Strategic intent seeks to maximize all
opportunities by using a wider canvas, a broader scope, to seek opportunity share, not market share. Strategic
intent, by shedding the ball-'n-chain notion of current weaknesses and leveraging off an ever-increasing
improvement in core competencies, uses foresight to envision all that could be.
- Wal-Mart had a novel and creative concept of scope. It chose to operate large stores mostly located in smaller
U.S. towns to avoid head-to-head competition with Sears and strip centers. Much of Wal-Mart's success has
come from this sort of early-on thinking. Rather than compete head-to-head for share against existing market
leaders, Wal-Mart chose the opportunity of smaller-city America—heeding a lesson from The Art of War,
"attack in places undefended."
- But do not seeks a “fit” between resources and aspirations, set realistic goals based on what you think you can
achieve with the resources at hand, then construct strategies and tactics to When vision and current reality are
clear there will be a gap between them. This is not bad, Fritz told us. He suggested the gap between vision and
reality forms a useful tension which he calls “structural tension”. Structural tension, like strategic intent, is
formed by the discrepancy between what you really want and what you currently have. It may be what gives
strategic intent its leverage and power.
Case of study:
Kingsly Gillette, inventor of the safety razor, founded the Gillette Company in 1901. Over the next 85
years, it grew to $2.7 billion in sales, with a market capitalization in 1986 of $2.9 billion—or about 1x of sales.
Over the last 8 years (ending in 1994), its sales have more then doubled to $6.1 billion. More amazing, its
market capitalization shot up to $16 billion—or nearly 3x of sales.
Fighting for its life in the "corporate takeover" 80's—once in 1986 against Revlon, a second against
Konison and Partners in 1988—Gillette decided to hone in at what it did best: razors. While shedding itself of
16 non-core companies, Gillette once again re-focused on the rallying cry within its strategic intent, "There is
always a better way to shave."
Emulating highly successful high-tech firms, Gillette first identified the technologies need to deliver the
next generation shaving system. Those technologies were plastics, metal-forming know how, and high speed
assembly. The first two are competencies, the latter is a capability.
Then the company began a list of "did you knows" to identify and communicate the R&D investments to
master those competencies. Did you know spring-loaded blades can overcome facial bumps and valleys? Did
you know that lasers weld metal with little (blade-defected induced, nick-causing, blood-flowing) distortion?
Gillette did not possess the laser technology that it had identified as a core competency. It went to the
outside market to find it. None existed there either. So, the company decided to develop the competency itself.
Combining all the (some new) competencies yielded the revolutionary product "Sensor Razor System."
This technically superior product still commands a premium price. Gillette has sold over 200 million Sensor
systems since its 1990 launch.