Business Strategy through Disruption
By Ger Hofstee and Sybren Tijmstra
English Paperback 9789087598785 , 2019
Summary
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survive is the one that is able to adapt to and to adjust best to the changing environment in which it finds itself……so says Charles Darwin in his “Origin of Species.” Ger Hofstee and Sybren Tijmstra, the authors of “Business Strategy through Disruption”, analyse the fast moving disruption developments in consumer- and service markets. Disruption means a sudden disruption of market shares, mostly by young new companies which take dominant positions in a market at the expense of existing market parties. Digital innovation, one of the most disruptive trends, becomes in a very short timeframe the driver of disruption. Disruption is a threat but also a chance! The old world, often surprised by the creative initiators of those new businesses, is paralyzed and ‘let it happen’. Disruption is not new. The first car canabalised the horse and carrage, the computer canabalised the typewriter and many more examples. Disruption is very predictable if in your market there is lack of transparency, lack of freedom of choice and waste of resources. A good illustration of the predictability of these risk factors is the Uber taxi market example. The proactive solution to avoid disruption is to become the disruptor yourself. That means development of a new creative business strategy, bold decision making and high service oriented implementation. Ger and Sybren advice MBA students and managers to survive the power of disruption in their markets, by adjusting more quickly. As writer Jackson Brown Jr formulate it most beautifully: “when you can’t change the direction of the wind - adjust your sails.” In this book you will find a lot of inspiration and tools, to create new competitive strategies and business planning to adjust your sails.
Now that our economies are gradually getting out of the recession, mergers and acquisitions are very hot again. However research shows time and time again that a lot of mergers and acquisitions are not providing the pay-offs hoped for. Good initial background information before concluding the deal is therefore of the essence. Financial due diligence is always part of that information, but cultural and human resource due diligence become, certainly for service companies, become also more and more en vogue. Commercial due diligence is however a rather new way of getting additional background information to increase the success rate of these deals.
Recently I had the pleasure of mentoring the thesis of Christophe Robinet and working with him on pay-off optimisation of mergers and acquisitions.
His thesis work “Merger & Acquisition Pay-off Optimization. The commercial due diligence imperative” is now available in book form and I can highly recommend it.
Excerpt book Merger & Acquisition pay-off optimization
Prof.Drs.R.Sybren Tijmstra