Playing at Strategy

Top Left: January 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review, Top right: Michael G. Jacobides

by Kevin Roberts

"The play's the thing" may be from Hamlet but the subject is from Michael Jacobides, an associate professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School who appears in the new issue of Harvard Business Review with an article Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape.

His starting point is the breathtaking speed at which customers and competitors transform - and the turbulence this creates. Traditional strategy frameworks aren't working, he says - they simplify rather than taking account of complexity and changing boundaries; they produce "still pictures of the future." Jacobides puts forward the playscript - a narrative in which "words are more powerful and flexible than value curves." Playscripts "consider how a company could succeed by reinventing its role as reality changes." His method involves characters and their roles, storylines and connections, links and rules, plots and subplots. More fun than the usual approach to strategy planning!

Jacobides' HBR article applies the playscript method to the challenges of the pharmaceutical industry; looks at how Ikea future proofed itself, how IBM reinvented itself, how Marvel Entertainment turned itself around - and this is the part I especially like - how Saatchi & Saatchi changed the very basis of its competition via Lovemarks.

The article cites the company's revival after its near collapse in the mid 1990s. Noting that "companies can change strategies by changing their roles," Jacobides writes that "Saatchi & Saatchi didn't just change its value proposition. It transformed itself into a strategic link between clients and their customers." By "writing a new playscript" Lovemarks shifted Saatchi & Saatchi from being suppliers to strategic partners; created an industry wide concept; cemented connections to clients; and increased the number of pitchless wins.

For me, it really was a case of "to be or not to be."


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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Crisis or Opportunity?

No one in their right mind would suggest that an economic collapse was just what we needed, but sometimes, tough times do throw up opportunities we don't hear when the bulls are roaring. I remember back in the 1970s, New York was a very different city to the one we know now. It had a gritty edge and the sense that anything could happen if you stepped beyond the lights. As the economy of the city collapsed and bankruptcy loomed, businesses folded or moved on to more congenial locations, leaving behind vast tracts of abandoned buildings and empty store fronts. One by one they were reoccupied, and very often by artists.

Downtown, the Bowery and SoHo exploded in a buzz of creativity. The subway, if you had the nerve to go down there, was a living gallery of graffiti art featuring the poignantly funny chalk drawings of Keith Haring on blacked out notice boards. As each train roared into the station, it was like watching a rainbow rocket past. Above ground, artists like Haring took advantage of empty stores and cheap rents to start their own enterprises. Haring called his the Pop Shop and it gave me the same charge of energy and enthusiasm I had seen and lived with in 1960s London.

I am certain we will see this same spirit blossom in the present crisis. One person's empty space is someone else's chance of a lifetime. This is certainly happening in London, a city that has been savagely hit by the current downturn. A number of artists have grabbed at empty shop fronts to create temporary exhibitions. It's the pop-up store concept in a different guise - opinionated, focused, passionate, committed. It's also an opportunity for local Councils to return some space to creative people to use as studios, sound recording suites, and practice rooms. Good times have the unfortunate effect of squeezing these essential creative resources out of the centre of cities. Let's welcome them back. Our ability to see opportunity rather than threat, and work to our strengths rather than succumb to our weaknesses is the way to get through these tough times. Best of all, it will inspire into the optimism we need to sustain us on the other side that we call the future.

Photo credit: Keith Haring's Pop Shop, New York, circa 1986. Photograph by Charles Golfi Michels.

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Designing a Sustainable Paris

In the race to create a sustainable world, designers will be key players. I've always been a big design fan and I salute the new sense of purpose now apparent in every aspect of this industry. It's becoming more experimental, more challenging, more ethical, and more exciting without losing its core functions - to stimulate ideas, change behavior, and offer help and hope.

Sustainability brings a whole new set of issues to the design table and a grandiose challenge was recently issued by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In a blaze of publicity, Sarkozy invited 10 architects to project 20 years into the future and come up with some ideas for the world's most sustainable metropolis.

The Italians, Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano, came up with an extraordinary idea that upturns urban conventions. Instead of starting with hard infrastructure (roads, subways, walkways), they started with the existing waterways of Paris. The Seine is an icon of Paris but there is a less well-known network of canals, rivers, and waterways. There are already efforts underway to renovate this 81 mile network, but Secchi and Vigano had even grander designs on it shaped by a fantastic metaphor: the sponge.

Sponges are living creatures that shift and change with conditions and survive on a constant flow of water through their bodies. What a beautiful idea. A city that flows, grows, and responds. A city that is more inclusive. A city that attracts ideas found in the natural world. So often designs founded on compelling metaphors are the ones to capture the public imagination.

"Renovate the canal system" or transform Paris into a sponge. No contest. Projects to improve sustainability, or based on sustainable principles, often fail the inspiration test. That's one reason why at Saatchi & Saatchi we have bonded with Blue as a motivating spirit. As Japanese designer, Fumi Masuda has pointed out, the job ahead is not to "sustain society as it is, but change society for sustainability".

That means inspiring people. The concepts of the 10 architects will be publicly displayed, debated, tested, and challenged in true French style. Paris to the Channel as a single city, Paris as archipelego, Paris as an eight-petal flower, a Paris of urban fields, Paris as sponge.


Photo credit: St. Martin Canal, Paris, by Jeff Polaski. Sourced from Photo.net

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.