Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find Your Company's Next Competitive Edge

by Andrea Kates

Overview

Combat flat sales, capture new markets, and drive innovation using the Business Genome approach

The Business Genome is a proprietary database that tracks company data, maps it across data of all industries, detects patterns, and determines precisely how that company should plan for the future.

In Find Your Next, Business Genome creator Andrea Kates explains how to ensure growth and prosperity in years to come. She provides the tools you need to create you business “genome,” or DNA—your company’s unique position in today’s market based on strengths, challenges, industry trends, and other factors—match it to that of a successful company in another industry, then model your own decisions on those of the matching company.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071778541
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	11/04/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Andrea Kates created the Business Genome approach to synthesize the insights she acquired during 15 years as the leader of more than 250 strategy initiatives for global corporations as well as entrepreneurs. Her client list includes Hewlett-Packard, Royal Dutch Shell (Asia-Pacific), JPMorgan Chase, Brinker International, Humana, KPMG, and the Houston Texans (NFL).

Read an Excerpt

Find Your Next

USING the BUSINESS GENOME APPROACH to FIND YOUR COMPANY'S NEXT COMPETITIVE EDGE

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By ANDREA KATES

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2012Andrea Kates
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-177854-1

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Business Genome: The Key to Next

Before anything else happens, an idea is born.

Democratize the automobile. Naturalize cleaning. Give shoes to the needy. Smooth out ticket pricing. Crowd source creativity. Communalize coupons. Shelve books on cell phones. Deliver the world overnight. Bring Napa Valley to wherever you are.

Then, a business emerges. Many do: Ford, Method, Toms Shoes, ScoreBig, IndieGoGo, Groupon, Coca Cola, Vook, FedEx, Cooper's Hawk.

Sometimes an organization—a brand—develops organically, inspiring a group of people to naturally flock to it and engage with it with little persuasion necessary. Other companies show up ahead of the crowd that will eventually come to support it. In either case, as the idea evolves, so do the processes, systems, people, products, and modes of distribution that will sustain it. And the company carves out its niche in the competitive landscape.

Corporate growth continues down a path, creating silos of expertise in finance, accounting, product development, research, marketing, and talent, until the organization defines its point of difference in a mushrooming world of customers.

Then, one day, someone in the organization will have an idea, a hunch.

• "I wonder if we could take this concept national."

• "I think we could expand our product line."

• "What if we could solve a bigger problem for our customers?"

• "I bet we could tap into the economic trends much more powerfully."

• "We're missing a big opportunity."

There the process begins: writing the company's next chapter, uncovering its next set of opportunities, realizing its next competitive edge, developing its next area for reinvention, locating its next group of customers. Or, for an entrepreneur, planting the seed of a brand new company altogether.

And, until now, that journey would have started with dissection. The company would measure its current strengths, weigh its component parts, evaluate its past results, and scrutinize its industry peers in search of its "next." The silos of capability that grew and developed to support complex business requirements now come to define the options for analysis. The range of potential places of where to go next may look a lot like what a company has already done, but instead is actually bigger, better, or different.

The strength of the most powerful opportunities is born from the cohesion of disparate elements from multiple strategies, and an incorporation of trends that can drive business in the future. The best way to write the next chapter for your organization is not to tweak each structural element individually but to create something bigger and all-inclusive—and then a game plan for how to get there.

1 + 1 + 1 = 5: The Value of a Systems Approach to Change

Matt Winter, CEO and President of Allstate Financial, believes in the value of what he describes as the systems approach to the sale of financial services: a multifaceted, interdisciplinary process with which the contribution of any individual component—product, for example—is enhanced by the impact of the other parts of the overall capacity—price and people, for example. As Matt Winter sought to reinvent his company, he realized it was time to recalculate the entire equation of consumer satisfaction. He thought it through, eliminating the obvious: simplification of the policy issue process, offering the same products being sold online, or updating slogans and branding. That approach would mitigate the true power of the change he envisioned. Winter knew that simply changing individual components wouldn't get Allstate Financial to its next level. The power of the company's reinvention, Winter believed, one that led to the development of an entirely new product set, customer experience, and distribution model and economic framework, had to come from the power of the combined, synergistic effect of multiple components, and not the individual effect of alterations to any single element.

Genomic Patterns Offer a Fresh Lens for Business

Learn from leaders of companies whose strategies reflect the Business Genome approach:

• Groupon, dedicated to bundling discounts online, took the idea of newspaper coupons and mixed it with the power of community to create a business that made $500 million in revenue in its first two years.

• OnStar matched the phone call home with GPS and the 911 emergency phone system to invent a way to exit the dashboard and enter Best Buy, morphing from a GM factory-installed service to an electronic device that can work on any vehicle.

• Cooper's Hawk infused great food and a relaxing atmosphere with Napa Valley vibe and added Facebook's viral sense of connection, community, and the power of recommendation to create a restaurant/winery that boasts the fastest-growing community of club members of any restaurant "cult" in the country.

• G.E. applied its desire of incorporating the new world of energy use and sustainability to its manufacturing powerhouse and invented its ecomagination generation of manufacturing products and facilities.

• Toms Shoes jumped on a growing philosophy to make a difference and defined a new space for shoes, in which the sense of community and social contribution could be married with every purchase.

The Business Genome approach is designed to allow everyone in business to follow their hunches, look at the world in a new way, and craft ideas for growth in just the ways that Groupon, OnStar, G.E., Toms Shoes, Cooper's Hawk, and Allstate Financial did. These ideas that became profitable organizations were conceived not by comparing an existing industry to the restaurants, insurance companies, shoe companies, or manufacturers of the company's competition, but by following a genomic process and finding patterns.

The Genomic Approach to Business

Businesses consist of components of great ideas that can be melded together to create and launch new business opportunities. When the higher-ups at Jiffy Lube started to suspect the value of selling oil had diminished in favor of a more holistic approach to the oil change experience, they used a genomic process to borrow ideas from other industries. Who had a great waiting room experience that could be built into a new model for Jiffy Lube? How could that experience be grafted onto the existing interior of Jiffy Lube's stores to create a killer app?

The genome mindset sparks new insights for translating the DNA of one business to the growth challenges of another. It allows us to see through a new lens. Now we can read the facts and figures in a different way, and shift our focus toward response and away from prediction. What we'll need are ideas—novel ideas—influenced by strategies that have worked successfully in other arenas. The Find Your Next process can help us get there by offering a systematic way of sorting through those ideas to land on opportunities for building up any company, whether a large, global enterprise or a local start-up.

The heritage for the genomic approach truly began in 1991, when the Human Genome Project defined a new playing field for genetic scientists interested in the next step of DNA analysis, thereby enabling people to trace their individual biological inheritance. It was a huge project that started with gene mapping and led to new medical innovations, because, for the first time, scientists could actually look at patterns of biological information and visualize connections.

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Excerpted from Find Your Next by ANDREA KATES. Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Kates. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Part 1 The Business Genome Approach
Chapter 1 The Business Genome: The Key to Next
Chapter 2 A New Outlook for Business
Chapter 3 Find Your Next Process
Part 2 The Business Genome Elements
Chapter 4 Product and Service Innovation
Chapter 5 Customer Impact
Chapter 6 Talent, Leadership, and Culture
Chapter 7 Process Design
Chapter 8 Secret Sauce
Chapter 9 Trendability
Part 3 Case Studies
P.F. Chang’s China Bistro
Sharp HealthCare + Hyatt Hotels and Resorts
General Electric Ecomagination / General Motors OnStar / EMC Corporation / Korn/Ferry International
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index