Strategy Definition

There is no longer a compass capable of indicating North. In the storm of recent years, only those companies and entrepreneurs will emerge who are able to pick up the right signals for navigation by looking beyond the waves.

Borrowing a metaphor from Karl Popper, it is possible to describe the market of past years as a clock in which everything was regular, simple, predictable and orderly. Variations could be read and, to a good extent, predicted: if demand grew, so did the price. The boundaries of the markets and the players in the field were well defined, like the face of a clock. The needs of customers were known, like one second always following the next.

On this basis, companies were able to devise durable and correct strategies because the high demand for goods and services, typical of a mass society, also covered any (and inevitable) forecast errors.

Today this mechanism has come to a halt.
The emergence of new economic powers, millions of new consumers and workers with heterogeneous cultures, the rise of new technologies and the revolution in production processes, are just some of the factors that have shattered the clock that marked the rhythm of past growth.

The inadequacy of the clock model was in a sense heralded in the early 1990s by the popularisers of Lean Production and Lean Thinking, the approach based on the TPS (Toyota Production System) and even better today on the Toyota Way, or Toyota Style.

“Lean manufacturing”, the TPS or better still the Toyota Way, promote the adoption of efficient methods and techniques to eliminate waste in order to recover internal resources (economic, material and human). These new resources can be invested in listening more carefully to the market and adapting all internal processes.

To make the Lean philosophy truly productive, it is not enough to rely on techniques and hope for change. It is necessary to plan a process of total formative, cultural and therefore behavioural renewal at all levels in the company.