Fast Follow, Fire?
One of the foundations of strategic business thinking frameworks used by leaders and strategists is 
called the Five Archetypes of Business Strategy which was presented in a landmark Harvard Business Review article called “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy” by Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns. The authors describe five different and unique archetypes or patterns of strategies that businesses can execute to meet their goals and objectives including:
- Classic: Be Big
- Visionary: Be First
- Adaptive: Be Fast
- Shaping: Be the Disruptor
- Renewal: Be Sustainable
- Amazon and Walmart are great examples of organizations who are executing the classic strategy of being big.
- Apple is of course the current champion of being the visionary and the first to market with innovative new products.
- Uber is the disruptor.
- Lego is now and hopefully will always be sustainable despite more and more digital toys and games.
Up until recently, Samsung has been the example of the Adaptive strategy by being a fast follower to Apple and others designing, developing, and delivering comparable and sometimes even better versions of products already in the market. They have been able to ride this strategy to becoming the largest producer of Smartphones in the world.
Until now.
Samsung - which has previously announced that they recalling almost 3 million Galaxy 7 Notes - now say they are going to discontinue production of the product as a result of the phone caching on fire.
There are many Business Acumen lessons embedded in this story and the focus of this blog is to isolate what went wrong and illustrate how other leaders can learn from this true business disaster.
In our Advantexe Business Simulation workshops, we provide participants with the opportunity of choosing a business strategy and executing that strategy in a competitive marketplace. This process enables the development of different approaches and we typically see one or two companies take on the Visionary role to establish market dominance and then one or two companies take on the Adaptive role and become the fast follower. Over the years, we have observed, listened, and watched carefully how this works. Here are 3 key learnings:
Alignment in Execution
The Adaptive strategy is only successful if there is flawless execution. As we see with Samsung, this did not happen very well. The most critical element of execution for the Adaptive strategy is alignment in execution; in other words Product Design, Marketing, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain Management must be one integrated system. There must be open lines of communication and leaders must focus most of their attention on making sure the details are attended to in the alignment process.
You Can’t Rush
The Adaptive strategy suggests adapting your strategy overtime and being able to be nimble and move quickly. But you can’t rush. The old saying that “Hast makes waste” has never been as true when you look at the Samsung situation. In their rush to keep up with and pass Apple, they moved too quickly, didn’t design effectively, and certainly didn’t have the right Quality Assurance in place.
Culture of Accountability
Inevitably, leaders within Samsung will be fired or forced to leave taking with them the blame and shame of this fiasco. And of course that is not a solution. The solution is the establishment of a culture of accountability. Leaders must share and get people to buy into a vision of taking ownership for a doing things the right way including safety for employees and safety for customers. Unfortunately the Adaptive strategy can blind leaders and decision makers of this foundational business approach because of the pressure to move quickly.
It will be interesting to see how Samsung survives. Their brand is strong and their market dominance in smartphones and other segments is even stronger. However, the Adaptive strategy will have to change and in the long run, that could be the most devastating thing of all to the company and the culture.
