We played around today looking for an exercise to use in an upcoming workshop. We wanted something that demonstrated working from you core value proposition and using an incremental growth strategy. I have been influenced by Chris Zook’s work, which is outlined in Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change and Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times. This is a strategy that I detail in my Lean Scale Up eBook.
By working from your core value proposition out it allows you to see where both your limitations and your opportunities may lie. I have used adjacency mapping before which stems from Chris Zook’s work. In his book, the authors demonstrate a map by taking an inventory of adjacencies of a core product or service. These adjacencies can be made up of customer segments, technologies, demographics and more. They put them in order by ranking and rating them extending from the core in a spoke like map. And as the authors say, “Forcing a ranking almost always stimulates a highly productive management discussion of core strategic issues grounded in data.”
However, we were still looking for something easier that could demonstrate the same concept. It was funny, but we kept coming back to The “Five Ws”. The “Five Ws” (and one H) were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his “Just So Stories” (1902), in which a poem accompanying the tale of “The Elephant’s Child” opens with:
I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.
The Kipling Growth Strategy Map
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