Strategy has been extensively addressed as unique positioning (cost leadership, differentiation, segment focused), gaining value addition through size and scope choices (diversification, integration) or process (operational effectiveness: TQM, building competence/capabilities). However in recent times, in many industries, the product quality, production capabilities, brand value, and product prices have leveled off among competitors, and almost all competitors and their offer

We have heard a lot about Mergers, and their triumphs and travails. For every successful merger, there are two failures. While immediate gains of mergers are reported and celebrated, the long-term quagmires and value erosion caused by mergers are scantly examined. For four decades, corporate world witnessed a big spell of merger mania with the claims of quick growth, consolidation, scale economy, and raising industry barriers. CEOs gained their eminence or lost their reputati

The conception of "industry" that we are used to in business lingua franca is fast becoming a noumenon (a non-perceivable reality). What we are witnessing across many industries is that product and manufacturing technologies are experiencing tumultuous transformations. These transformations can be visualized on two major dimensions: Convergence and Divergence. The end result of these transformations is the disappearance of the notion of industry familiar to us in the past few

Alcoa (Aluminum Corporation of America) is a global leader in lightweight metals, engineering & manufacturing, Alcoa innovates multi-material solutions, and its technologies enhance transportation, from automotive and commercial transport to air and space travel, and improve industrial and consumer electronics products. Alcoa’s products enable smart buildings, sustainable food and beverage packaging, high-performance defense vehicles across air, land and sea, deeper oil and g

"Shoaling or School of Fish Strategy is a strategic design or configuring of an organization's value chain and assets into smaller, dis-aggregated and dispersed units through modularity, franchising, alliances, teams, and ownership-sharing so as to create and reach markets far and wide, and achieve sustainable growth, learning economies, innovation, agility and speed while reducing cost and investment risk". #kaleidoscopicorganization #smallisbeautiful #TeamBuilding #Transfor

Large firms are increasingly facing existential crisis. While knowledge and information era organizations are replacing industrial age giants in the honor rolls of technocratic leadership, quality, excellence, and profitability, the large industrial era firms (whether banking, utilities, automobile, metals) are struggling to retain their financial attractiveness and are increasingly becoming unsustainable. During the industrial era, becoming large was considered 'a thumb rul

Google's recent restructuring of the entire corporation into a collection of companies under the holding company called Alphabet can be considered a Shoaling formation. The URL for the new company Alphabet is abc.xyz. Alphabet includes the following entities: A smaller company called Google, headed by CEO Sundar Pichai, that includes the company's core businesses. Those businesses: "search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android and the related technical infrastructure." Other

ALCOA Another company to join the stream of companies doing right sizing and shoaling form of corporate governance. Metals firm Alcoa said on Monday it would split into two publicly traded entities, acknowledging that its legacy aluminum operations and higher-value and automotive businesses were diverging and no longer compatible. New York-based Alcoa's traditional smelting business has been hurt by a ballooning surplus of aluminum, which has caused prices to sink and deepene

Times have changed!, Scale economy is gone! Knowledge-era has come to stay! It has become inexorable for companies to continually adapt to dynamic markets and technologies! Small and medium size companies need not fear the competition in terms of pricing & market share from large firms if they can configure their strategy and value-chain organization in modular arrays. Whereas large companies cannot be complacent about their size and scale advantages. They are compelled to o

With the advent of new millennium, knowledge economy has taken stronger roots across many industries gradually replacing the scale economy firms. As markets have become quite dynamic and technologies are changing radically, it is inexorable for companies to continually innovate and adapt to change. In this new context, established firms as well as emerging industry-challengers continually search for strategies that can ensure better returns with minimal risk. While incumbent