Capability-based strategy: beware ‘core competences’.

How to win by changing the game by head of Booz N America business Cesare Mainardi, and colleagues Paul Leinwand and Steffen Lauster makes a strong case for building capabilities to capture new opportunities, rather than looking inward at what you already have. Capabilities feature strongly in current strategy writing, but seem hard to make practical. The article implies, though, that they have a way of making capabilities concrete and measurable, to arrive at a ‘capability coherence’ indicator that seems to correlate with profitability – at least in the consumer products sector. This is a big step forward from the abstract and obscure concepts that feature in academic articles on the topic.  Read more