Identifying Your Best Areas for Rapid Business Progress -INNOVATION LEADERSHIP-

Peter Drucker has a famous description of strategy that includes the idea of "sloughing off yesterday," by which he means that we should stop doing that which is no longer important for us. When a company creates a new set of opportunities to expand into more promising areas, generally there is a resource squeeze for time, people, and budget.

Now that you know the best places to focus, you should turn the information you have developed around to identify the areas you are now working on that are least likely to be valuable to your company, in order to free up resources.

This means identifying:

• the customers where you will earn a lower profit margin than some competitors will;
  
• actions that customers are not interested in;
  
• actions where the track record is poor for similar efforts;
  
• or actions where the approach will produce slow sales growth, low relative profit margin compared to competitors, and/or require large amounts of new capital compared to sales;
  
• acquisitions or outsourcing that would be better ways to proceed;
  
• directions you are pursuing that are now are very unpopular for those who must implement them;
  
• areas where the compensation and feedback processes cannot be easily changed to support an appropriate objective.

© 1998 Mitchell and Company

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